A familiar motif courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with competence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a steady diet of mostly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, 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, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
