An age-old theme courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Offered a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious 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 the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly 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
