A familiar motif permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Every time elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Given a regular dose of predominantly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson 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 slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
