A familiar theme courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people be taught a lesson 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 eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
