A familiar theme runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
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 insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that hinders meaningful change. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
