An age-old idea runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the tough people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials follow a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the headlines reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of largely triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people live by different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
