A recurring idea courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that stretches all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while using digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, 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 updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials react to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the news reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with competence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of mostly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
