A recurring theme courses through many of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
There is little especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of predominantly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined 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 reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
