A familiar theme courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — to make money, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with 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 exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers follow a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the news reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Given a steady diet of mostly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, 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, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
