An age-old theme courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There is little especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, 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 the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of largely triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
