A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with smartness and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
