A recurring motif courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the tough residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There is little inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians follow a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses 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
