An age-old idea permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the news makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Given a steady diet of predominantly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, 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 affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. 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
