An age-old motif permeates many of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
It is not inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials react to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Given a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
