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A recurring idea permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.

A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.

It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.

The Catharsis That Fails to Transform

However, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.

If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Given a frequent serving of mostly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.

A Sharper Tone in 2025

Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."

The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.

Key Exceptions

There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid