A familiar idea permeates numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers follow a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of largely uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility 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, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined 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 redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
