A familiar theme runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with 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 rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of largely triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, 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, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
