A familiar theme permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the tough people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals 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 packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the news demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Offered a steady diet of mostly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, 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 particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
