A recurring theme courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time elected officials react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to competence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of mostly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and apparently 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
