A recurring theme courses through many of 2025's popular films. This concept that goes far back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time politicians react to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying 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 hinders meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
