An age-old idea permeates a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of largely uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, 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 affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. 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 revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
