A familiar motif permeates numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends far back to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. But the headlines reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a steady diet of predominantly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
