A familiar idea permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is contrary to core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever politicians follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
