A familiar motif runs through numerous 2025's popular films. This notion that goes all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time politicians respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of mostly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people live by different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends 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* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
