A recurring theme permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches back in time to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up 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 rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, 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 revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a steady diet of largely uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, 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 reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
