A familiar theme courses through many of 2025's popular films. This concept that goes all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, 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 revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with competence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
