An age-old idea permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes back in time to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, contrasts the tough people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of largely triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility in humility, 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
