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A recurring theme courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.

A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.

There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, 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 refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.

The Outlet That Fails to Transform

And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers react to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly 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 revere billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.

If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

An Angrier Tone in 2025

Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory 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, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally 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 apparent that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Exceptions

There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid