An age-old motif runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while using AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of mostly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more violent. 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, greedy, hateful wealthy people 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 distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
