A recurring idea runs through a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, 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 wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of largely uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more lethal. 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*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 assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people function with different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
