A familiar motif courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating 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 dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the news reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of largely triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
