An age-old motif runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of mostly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*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, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
