An age-old motif runs through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes far back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There is little especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of mostly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated 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 rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
