A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — to make money, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a regular dose of largely uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
