A familiar idea permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, 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 revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials follow a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the news makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of largely uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished 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 transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
