A familiar theme permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
It is not especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of largely triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Although 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 enraged, sharper, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days 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 affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*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 national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
