An age-old motif courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of predominantly triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people live by different standards, and are very likely 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 horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
