An age-old idea runs through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. 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 greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of largely triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people live by different standards, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. 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 unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
