A recurring motif courses through numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while using digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — to make money, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character 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 revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials follow a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the news reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Given a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
