A recurring idea permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends back in time to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, 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 refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Given a regular dose of predominantly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*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 ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched 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 reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
