A familiar idea courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From 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 entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, 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 gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. 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 exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
