An age-old theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of mostly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*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 super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled 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 reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
