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A recurring idea courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes back in time to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains 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 On-Screen Wealth Disparity

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.

There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.

The Release That Alters Little

Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at 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 allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the news demonstrates regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.

If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.

An Angrier Edge in 2025

But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel 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 distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."

The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.

Significant Outliers

A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid