An age-old theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune 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 cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, 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 that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the daily reports reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of largely uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
