A familiar theme permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the tough people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Every time elected officials respond to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of largely triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
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* finds himself confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
