An age-old motif runs through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the tough people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting 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 greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever politicians react to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. But the daily reports reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, 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 reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
