A familiar theme courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever elected officials respond to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of largely uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money 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 eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses 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
