A recurring idea permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that stretches all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time politicians react to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the news reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a steady diet of mostly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, 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 wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
