A familiar motif courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, 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 exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion politicians respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the headlines reveals regularly 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 conveying the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that impedes meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
