A familiar idea permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning 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 rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the news reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Given a steady diet of predominantly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
