A recurring theme permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Given a frequent serving of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, 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 reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
