A familiar idea permeates a host of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends back in time to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit 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 affluence is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of largely triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death 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 clear that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is 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 thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
