A recurring idea permeates many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes far back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials react to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of mostly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, 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 isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
