A familiar motif courses through many of 2025's popular films. This concept which extends all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — to make money, of course.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, 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 eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer 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 redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
