A recurring motif permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From 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 entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and applaud the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion politicians react to a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, possibly since it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
