An age-old theme permeates numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of mostly triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
