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A recurring theme courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.

A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy

In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — to make money, naturally.

There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed 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 incompatible with core morality, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.

The Catharsis That Changes Nothing

However, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time politicians react to a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the news reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.

Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Offered a frequent serving of largely triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.

An Angrier Message in 2025

But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune 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 devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."

The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.

Notable Exclusions

A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends 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 redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid