An age-old theme permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while using digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
