A familiar idea runs through numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There is little especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From 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 exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians react to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Given a steady diet of largely uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly 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 forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people function with different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
