A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — to make money, of course.
It is not especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of mostly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*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, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
