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A recurring theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.

A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy

In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist running 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 smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.

There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.

The Catharsis That Fails to Transform

Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the news reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.

Actually, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.

A More Pointed Tone in 2025

But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."

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

Key Exclusions

There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid