A familiar theme courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes far back to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering tens of millions to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to competence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Given a steady diet of largely uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with 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 conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
