A familiar theme permeates many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its villains live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Offered a steady diet of mostly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people function with different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
