An age-old motif permeates numerous 2025's popular films. This notion which extends back in time to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians react to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the headlines reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of predominantly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson 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, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
