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A recurring idea permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that stretches back in time to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.

A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, of course.

There is little inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. 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 rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.

The Catharsis That Fails to Transform

However, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time politicians follow a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the news reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.

Actually, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.

An Angrier Tone in 2025

Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."

The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.

Key Exceptions

Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid