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A familiar motif courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept which extends back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.

A Tradition of Film Class Warfare

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the tough residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.

There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. 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 entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.

The Catharsis That Alters Little

And yet, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Every time politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the news makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.

Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of mostly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

An Angrier Edge in 2025

But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."

The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Outliers

A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid