A familiar motif permeates many 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 villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while using digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — to make money, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, 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 that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians follow a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the headlines reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of largely triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up 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 class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and observably more fatal. 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 be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself 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 reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
