An age-old theme permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to core morality, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the news makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a frequent serving of mostly triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, 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 rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
