An age-old idea permeates numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches far back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the tough people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever politicians respond to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
