A recurring theme courses through numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed 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 beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people function with different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
