An age-old theme permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus 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 clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians respond to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, 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 rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
