An age-old idea courses through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes far back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the tough residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — to make money, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with 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 whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time elected officials respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the news reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and apparently more fatal. 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 lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly 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 exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
