A familiar idea courses through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time politicians react to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the news reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
