An age-old theme runs through a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers follow a public shooting event by faulting 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 collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Offered a steady diet of largely triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson 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, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
