A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the headlines reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with smartness and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of mostly triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
