A familiar motif runs through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that goes back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers react to a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era 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, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
