An age-old motif runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, 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 a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the headlines reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
