A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy 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 string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor 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 refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — 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 worship billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
