A recurring motif permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention 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*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians respond to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
