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A familiar theme courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that goes all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.

A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity

In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.

There is little inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From 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 greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.

The Catharsis That Alters Little

Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the daily reports reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.

Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Tone in 2025

Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people live by different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Exceptions

A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid