An age-old idea runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians react to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Given a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
