An age-old idea runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, 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 that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers follow a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, 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. Provided with a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
