A recurring idea permeates numerous 2025's popular films. This concept which extends back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. 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 exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians react to a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. 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 exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
