A recurring motif courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
There is little especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and exalt the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of largely triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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 rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
