An age-old motif courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends back in time to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, 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 stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
However, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of predominantly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
