A familiar theme runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating 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 movie, sets the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the news demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, 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, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
