An age-old idea courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches far back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the tough residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
There is little especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, 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 updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of largely triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
