A recurring idea runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers follow a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the headlines reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people function with different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled 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 redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
