A familiar motif courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the tough people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — to make money, of course.
There is little especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, 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 refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Given a steady diet of largely uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
