A familiar theme runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the tough people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — to make money, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and apparently more lethal. 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
