An age-old idea runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that stretches far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the tough residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the headlines reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone 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 more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any 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" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the virtual grid, 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 wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
