A recurring theme permeates many of 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting 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 updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people live by different standards, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, 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 wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
