An age-old idea runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches far back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the tough residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, 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 reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
