A recurring motif courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This concept which extends far back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, 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 revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a steady diet of mostly uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
