An age-old idea permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches far back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting 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" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers follow a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays 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, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people function with different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
