A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the tough residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. 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 greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers react to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of predominantly triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
