A recurring idea courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the tough people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
