A familiar motif permeates many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends far back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed 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 assume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians follow a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the news demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer 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* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
