A familiar theme runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, 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 rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the news demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility 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, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds 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 wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
