2025's Biggest Films Urged Us to Consume the Wealthy Again. We Yet Refuse to Listen.
A recurring theme courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of largely triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
