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A familiar motif permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept which extends all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.

A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.

There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished 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 updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.

The Outlet That Fails to Transform

Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians react to a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the news demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.

Actually, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

A More Pointed Edge in 2025

But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."

The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Exceptions

Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid