A recurring motif runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a 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 eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of 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
