A familiar theme courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of predominantly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
