An age-old idea courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This notion that goes all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning 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 exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time elected officials follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure 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 demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of largely uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
