A familiar theme runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends far back to the days of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, contrasts the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and clueless rich men. 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 greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the daily reports reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
