A familiar idea courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — to make money, of course.
It is not especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
