A familiar motif runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, 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 a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. But the headlines reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Given a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
