A recurring theme courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the tough people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, 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 exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
