A familiar motif runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, 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 the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Given a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough in the current era 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
