A familiar motif permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to trap 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 kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of largely triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
