A recurring theme permeates many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that stretches far back to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers react to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Given a steady diet of largely uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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 eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. 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* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
