A recurring motif courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, 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 that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the daily reports reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Given a steady diet of largely triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
