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A recurring motif courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.

A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity

In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.

There is little especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, 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 revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and applaud the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.

The Outlet That Fails to Transform

However, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, 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 public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.

If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a steady diet of mostly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.

A Sharper Tone in 2025

Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, 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 wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are highly probable to buy their way out."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.

Notable Outliers

A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished 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 frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid