An age-old idea runs through many of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, 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 revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of largely triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 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 more enraged, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
