An age-old motif courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches far back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a regular dose of mostly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful 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, selfish, cruel wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
