A familiar theme courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that goes back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the tough people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the news demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of mostly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson 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, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
