An age-old theme permeates numerous 2025's popular films. This notion which extends all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with smartness and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
