A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever politicians react to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of largely triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era 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 eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
