A familiar motif permeates many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, contrasts the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Given a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant stories 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, implying that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. 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 revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
