A familiar motif courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends far back to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the tough people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, 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 revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers react to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of predominantly triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
