An age-old idea runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility 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, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
