A recurring idea courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, 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 collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to competence and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 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 targeted, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
