A familiar idea courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, 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 a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials follow a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Offered a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 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 targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished 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 transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
