A familiar motif permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the news demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of largely uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated 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 corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of 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