An age-old idea runs through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that goes back in time to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials follow a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the news reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of predominantly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*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 at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
