A recurring idea courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, 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 revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians react to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility in humility, 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 eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people live by different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched 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* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
