An age-old motif runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends far back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the tough people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed 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 finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, 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 transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
