A familiar idea permeates a host of 2025's popular films. This concept that goes far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, 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 updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a regular dose of largely uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*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 killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people function with different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly 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 unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
