An age-old idea courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — to make money, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with 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 exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time politicians respond to a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the headlines reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a steady diet of largely uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
