A familiar idea courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme dates back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, 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 continue to idolize billionaires. But the daily reports reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Given a frequent serving of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a 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, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered 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 shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
