A familiar theme courses through numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, 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 — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the news reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of predominantly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined 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 reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
