A recurring theme courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This notion that goes far back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. 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 rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a regular dose of largely triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid