A recurring idea permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with core morality, and applaud the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
