A recurring theme courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Given a steady diet of largely uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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 killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
