A familiar motif courses through many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, 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 root out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
