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An age-old idea courses through numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends back in time to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.

A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy

In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.

It is not inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, 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 updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.

The Release That Fails to Transform

However, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.

If anything, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a steady diet of largely triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.

An Angrier Tone in 2025

But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."

The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.

Notable Exceptions

There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, 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