An age-old idea permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually 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 continue to idolize billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of largely triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, 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 redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
