A familiar motif permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials follow a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Given a steady diet of predominantly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
