An age-old motif runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends back in time to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. 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 greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Every time lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
