A familiar motif runs through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches far back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger 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 rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials follow a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the news makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of mostly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
