A familiar theme runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Given a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
