An age-old motif runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the tough people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of largely uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously 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 revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
