A recurring idea courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — to make money, of course.
It is not especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of mostly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
