A familiar theme runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches far back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians respond to a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the news demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Given a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
