An age-old theme permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends far back to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the tough people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials react to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the news reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished 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 reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
