A familiar idea courses through many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of largely uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated 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 point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people live by different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
