A familiar idea permeates many of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute 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 entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of largely uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. 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 revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
