A familiar idea courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever politicians react to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly 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 unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
