A familiar idea runs through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept which extends far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content 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 mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson 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, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
