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A familiar idea runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept which extends all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.

A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.

There is little inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of elite figures.

The Release That Alters Little

Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to competence and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.

In fact, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of largely uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.

An Angrier Message in 2025

But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."

The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.

Key Outliers

A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid