An age-old theme permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, contrasts the tough residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals 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 point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
