An age-old motif permeates a host of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Every time lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
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 gets in the way of real-world action. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
