An age-old motif permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the tough residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, 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 revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the headlines reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of mostly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
