An age-old theme runs through a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the tough residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered 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 a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
