An age-old motif permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept which extends back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little especially new in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, 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 a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials react to a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with 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 prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
