A recurring motif courses through numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians respond to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. But the news makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
