🔗 Share this article

An age-old idea permeates many of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes far back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.

A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare

In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the tough residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — to make money, naturally.

There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.

The Release That Fails to Transform

However, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.

Actually, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a regular dose of predominantly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.

An Angrier Edge in 2025

But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.

Notable Exclusions

Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid