A recurring theme permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time politicians react to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Given a regular dose of largely triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
