A familiar idea permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed 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 presume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of largely triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
