A familiar theme courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly 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 idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of largely uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days 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, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
