A recurring motif courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the tough people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of predominantly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
