A familiar idea permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials follow a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled 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 transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
