An age-old motif runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — to make money, of course.
There is little especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that hinders meaningful change. Offered a frequent serving of mostly triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, 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 rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
