A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the tough people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time elected officials respond to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a steady diet of largely triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, 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 unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
