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An age-old idea courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that stretches all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.

A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.

There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Fails to Transform

And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials follow a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.

In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a regular dose of mostly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.

An Angrier Message in 2025

But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more violent. 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.

Key Outliers

A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid