An age-old theme courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers follow a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that impedes real-world action. Offered a regular dose of predominantly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up 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 transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
