A recurring motif permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation 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*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. From 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 complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that impedes real-world action. Given a regular dose of largely uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, 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 mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting 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* finds himself banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid