An age-old idea permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the tough residents of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
It is not especially new in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays 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, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. 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 revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
