A familiar theme runs through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that goes all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the tough residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning 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 Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a regular dose of mostly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
