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A familiar theme courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that stretches all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.

A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity

In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.

There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with core morality, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.

The Release That Alters Little

Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. But the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.

If anything, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of largely uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.

An Angrier Message in 2025

But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, 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 wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."

The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.

Key Exceptions

A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. 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 revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid