An age-old idea runs through numerous 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is contrary to core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Given a steady diet of mostly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era 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, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
