A familiar idea runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever politicians react to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the news demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of predominantly happily-ever-after tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
