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A familiar idea courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.

A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy

In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the tough people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.

There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting 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 rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.

The Outlet That Alters Little

And yet, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.

If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of largely uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Tone in 2025

But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."

The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.

Significant Outliers

There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid