A familiar idea courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time politicians react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Given a regular dose of predominantly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
