An age-old motif permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of largely uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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 rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
