An age-old idea permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Given a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, 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 affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
