A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends back in time to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
