A familiar motif runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends far back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain 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 rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little 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 bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. From 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 rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, 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 eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
