A familiar idea runs through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting 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 tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers react to a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of predominantly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
