An age-old motif courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, 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 revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
