An age-old theme runs through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept which extends far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *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 extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the tough people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of largely triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
