A recurring motif permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered 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 feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously 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 unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
