An age-old theme permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, 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 refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of mostly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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 wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
