An age-old theme runs through many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in extravagant gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, 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 replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the news reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of predominantly uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days 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, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, 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 transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
