An age-old idea courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Every time politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to competence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
