A recurring motif courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Given a steady diet of predominantly triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
