A recurring theme runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, 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 early days of film, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Every time elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits 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
