An age-old idea courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever politicians follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
