A recurring motif runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the tough people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a steady diet of predominantly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly 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 regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*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 directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
