A familiar idea courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the news reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days 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 affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. 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
