A familiar motif permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes back in time to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while using digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the headlines reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a regular dose of mostly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. 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 exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
