A recurring motif courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to competence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
