A familiar motif courses through many of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends far back to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the news reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of mostly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of 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
