A recurring motif courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the tough residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — to make money, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with 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 exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption 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 every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, 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 rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only 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 future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
