A familiar theme courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept which extends back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers react to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — 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. But the daily reports reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of largely uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured 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 murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
