A familiar motif courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — to make money, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with core morality, and exalt the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever politicians react to a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator 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* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
