An age-old motif permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials respond to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of largely uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
