🔗 Share this article

A recurring motif courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes far back to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.

A Lineage of Film Class Warfare

In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury 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 highest-grossing movie, contrasts the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.

There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Alters Little

And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.

In fact, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

An Angrier Tone in 2025

Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.

Key Exceptions

A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid