An age-old motif permeates a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes back in time to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, 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 a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the news reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays 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 eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
