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A recurring theme courses 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 villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.

A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.

There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story 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 riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.

The Release That Alters Little

And yet, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.

In fact, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Given a regular dose of predominantly uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.

A Sharper Message in 2025

Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly 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, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."

The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.

Key Outliers

Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid