A recurring idea runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while using AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians follow a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of mostly triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
