An age-old motif runs through a host of 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the tough people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the news demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of largely uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
