An age-old theme runs through a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches far back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, 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 updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers react to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of mostly triumphant tales 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, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
