A familiar theme courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind 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* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
