A recurring theme courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches far back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that 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. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned 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 obvious that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
