A familiar idea runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, 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 a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up 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 transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
