An age-old motif courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Given a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*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 improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people function with different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, 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 redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
