A familiar motif runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Every time elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, 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 would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of largely triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people be taught a 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
