An age-old theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and exalt the defusing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Given a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, 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 slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
