An age-old idea courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the tough residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — to make money, of course.
There is little especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. 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 exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, 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 public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. 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 revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
