An age-old theme permeates numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its villains live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Given a steady diet of predominantly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, 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, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
