A recurring idea permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes back in time to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of mostly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, 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 confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. 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
