A familiar idea courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the tough people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers follow a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of largely triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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 rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
