A familiar theme runs through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that goes all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, 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 revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the news makes it obvious constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of largely uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a lesson 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 wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
