An age-old motif permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
It is not especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, 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 a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time elected officials react to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of largely triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
