A familiar motif courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that goes far back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of largely triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
