A familiar idea permeates a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with 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 exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people live by different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
