An age-old motif runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting 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 exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the news demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a frequent serving of mostly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money 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 consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
