A recurring motif runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the news reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a steady diet of largely triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
