A recurring theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of predominantly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
