A familiar theme permeates many of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — to make money, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Given a steady diet of mostly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. 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 unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
