An age-old motif permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes far back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by different standards, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly 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 wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
