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A recurring motif runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends far back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.

A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.

There is little inherently notable in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.

The Release That Alters Little

However, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians respond to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. But the daily reports reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.

In fact, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Given a steady diet of mostly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.

A More Pointed Tone in 2025

Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).

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

The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.

Significant Outliers

There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously 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 exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid