A recurring idea runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the news reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
