A recurring theme permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a steady diet of largely uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
