A recurring motif runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes far back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, 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 real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of mostly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, possibly since it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
