An age-old motif permeates a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the headlines reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of largely uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough these days 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
