An age-old idea permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that stretches all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
It is not inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent 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 wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
