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A recurring motif courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.

A Legacy of On-Screen Wealth Disparity

In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.

It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.

The Release That Alters Little

And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the news reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.

Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.

A Sharper Message in 2025

But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Exceptions

Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled 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 transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid