A familiar motif permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes back in time to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the tough people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There is little especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a steady diet of largely triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
