A recurring theme runs through many of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Given a steady diet of predominantly triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, 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 killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
