A familiar idea courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time politicians react to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of mostly triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses 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
