A familiar idea runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians react to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Given a regular dose of predominantly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, 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 wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, 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 frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
