An age-old motif courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches far back to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the tough residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of largely triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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 affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
