A familiar idea permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time politicians follow a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, 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 transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
