A familiar theme permeates many of 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really 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 revere billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Given a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
