An age-old idea courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while using digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials react to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the news reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people live by different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
