An age-old motif permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends back in time to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Given a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, 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 slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious 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 different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. 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
