A familiar idea runs through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful 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, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
