A recurring idea permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while employing digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Every time elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of largely uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered 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 gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, 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 redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
