An age-old theme courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes far back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while employing digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Every time elected officials follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of largely triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
