A familiar motif courses through many of 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Offered a steady diet of mostly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exceptions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
