An age-old motif permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while using digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the tough residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
There is little especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of largely triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people be taught a lesson 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, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are very 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 notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
