A familiar theme runs through a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting 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 updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of largely triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more lethal. 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 lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer 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* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
