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A recurring theme permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.

A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity

In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — to make money, of course.

There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Fails to Transform

And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the news reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.

In fact, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.

A Sharper Tone in 2025

But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."

The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Exceptions

A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid