An age-old idea permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
It is not particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of mostly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself 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
