A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes 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 mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
It is not especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders meaningful change. Given a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, possibly since it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
