An age-old motif permeates many of 2025's popular films. This concept that goes all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — to make money, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of mostly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously 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 thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
