A familiar theme permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There is little especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a regular dose of largely triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
