A recurring motif courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the tough residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — to make money, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that impedes real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending 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.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune 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 consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under different standards, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
