A recurring idea permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — to make money, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials respond to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a regular dose of largely uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
