A familiar theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with 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 entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Offered a regular dose of mostly triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
