A familiar idea runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends far back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really 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. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to competence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated 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 live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
