A familiar idea courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends far back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *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 run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough in the current era 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, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered 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 finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. 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 revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
