🔗 Share this article

A familiar idea courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This notion that goes all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.

A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare

In the remake of *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 enduring extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.

There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, 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 a similar story 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 affluence is contrary to core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.

The Catharsis That Alters Little

However, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the headlines reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.

Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Offered a steady diet of mostly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.

A More Pointed Message in 2025

Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on a broadcast (*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 conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."

The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.

Significant Exclusions

There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid