An age-old theme courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes 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 mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians react to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of largely triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, 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. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
