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A familiar idea courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.

A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while using AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, naturally.

It is not inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, 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 revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.

The Release That Changes Nothing

Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians follow a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the headlines reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.

Actually, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

An Angrier Message in 2025

But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough these days 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.

Notable Exceptions

Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid