A familiar theme runs through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — to make money, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, 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 revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians react to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled 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 transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
