An age-old idea courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This concept which extends all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the tough people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
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 popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the headlines reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people live by different standards, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
