A familiar motif runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with 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 greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular 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 gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of largely triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished 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 redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
