A familiar theme courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, 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 constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Given a regular dose of largely triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. 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
