An age-old idea permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that stretches far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
