An age-old motif runs through a host of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with core morality, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever elected officials react to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with smartness and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of mostly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by 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 likely to die at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. 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 exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
