An age-old motif permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, 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 the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a regular dose of largely uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
