A familiar theme permeates numerous 2025's popular films. This notion that goes all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people operate under different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
