A familiar motif runs through a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, 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 refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians react to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
