A familiar theme courses through a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials react to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, 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 affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. 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 revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
