An age-old idea courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with 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 exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, 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 rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
