An age-old motif permeates a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes far back to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the tough residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of largely triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed 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 gunned down point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
