A familiar motif permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, 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 revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of predominantly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility 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, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously 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 exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
