A familiar motif courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches back in time to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources 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 spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while using digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the defusing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers react to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Given a frequent serving of largely uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
