A familiar theme permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians respond to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the news demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
