An age-old idea runs through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends far back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, 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 refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
