A recurring theme runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time elected officials respond to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — 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 idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of mostly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, 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 colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
