A recurring theme courses through many of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the news reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
