An age-old motif permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever politicians respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the news reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of largely triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
