A recurring motif permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the tough residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians follow a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of mostly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses 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
