A familiar motif permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the news reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of mostly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility 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 slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
