A familiar theme runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From 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 entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the news makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously 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 exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
