An age-old theme runs through numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the tough residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From 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 tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time elected officials react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility 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 killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
