A familiar motif permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with 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 rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers follow a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the headlines reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
