An age-old theme courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while using digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the tough people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever politicians follow a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, possibly since it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
