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A familiar theme runs through a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that goes all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating 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 death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.

A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.

There is little especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning 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 greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Changes Nothing

However, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the news makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to competence and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.

Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of largely happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Tone in 2025

But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.

Significant Exceptions

Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, 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 reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid