A familiar motif permeates numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that goes back in time to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From 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 tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever politicians follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the news reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of largely uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exceptions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously 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
