An age-old motif permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, 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 a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers follow a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Offered a steady diet of largely triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to 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" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
