A familiar theme permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the tough residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
It is not especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, 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 revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the news demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility 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, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses 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
