A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people 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 goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to competence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era 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, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
