A recurring motif permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning 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 tech-bro villain, the whole legacy 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 powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of mostly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
