An age-old motif permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, 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 updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era 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, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously 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 wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
