A recurring idea permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the tough residents of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the headlines reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth 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 enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. 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 unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
