A recurring motif runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends far back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — to make money, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to competence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, 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, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*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 ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished 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 reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
