An age-old theme runs through many of 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, 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 revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials follow a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Given a steady diet of mostly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
