An age-old idea runs through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time elected officials follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the news demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of mostly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, 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, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
