A familiar idea permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the tough residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, of course.
There is little especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting 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 tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians follow a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, 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 persistently revere billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, 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 wealthy people were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
