An age-old theme courses through many of 2025's popular films. This concept that goes far back to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the news makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a regular dose of predominantly triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and observably more fatal. 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
