An age-old motif permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with 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 rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Offered a steady diet of predominantly triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful 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 alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends 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 transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
