A recurring motif permeates a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes far back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the tough residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply 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* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
