An age-old theme courses through many of 2025's popular films. This concept that goes back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, 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. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Offered a steady diet of largely uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
