A recurring motif permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From 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 greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
However, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the news reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting 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 real-world action. Given a steady diet of mostly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid