An age-old theme courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of largely triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
