A familiar theme courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. But the daily reports reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Given a steady diet of largely triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays 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 rich individuals 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 gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people function with different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
