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A familiar theme courses through a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that stretches far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.

A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — to make money, naturally.

It is not especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.

The Outlet That Alters Little

And yet, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with competence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.

In fact, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.

A More Pointed Edge in 2025

Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.

Notable Exclusions

A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid