A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Given a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough these days 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, 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 reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
