An age-old theme courses through many of 2025's popular films. This concept that goes far back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time politicians react to a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of mostly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends 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 redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
