A familiar theme runs through many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians react to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the news reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that impedes meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, 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, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
