A familiar motif courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians follow a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of largely triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten 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 stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
