A familiar motif permeates many of 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of largely uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits 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
