There’s a familiar theme running through a lot of 2025’s genre movies, including its biggest box-office hits. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s Superman, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth’s greatest hero, while manipulating world events for his own profit. In Jurassic World: Rebirth, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions of dollars to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In Zootopia 2, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes from a dynasty that stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.

In The Running Man, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. Wicked: For Good doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz’s most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. Ne Zha 2, the year’s number one box-office hit, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even the agreeably goofy comedy reboot The Naked Gun centers on a billionaire’s plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.

There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. “Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes” as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and an inept, drunken millionaire. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland “Let’s put on a show to save our clubhouse from being torn down by a rich developer!”

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