An age-old theme permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians follow a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the news demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of predominantly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
