A recurring motif permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, 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 updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the news reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of largely triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
