A familiar idea runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the tough people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers react to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished 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 redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
