A recurring idea runs through a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians react to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to competence and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of largely triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility in humility, 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 killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply 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 a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
