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A familiar theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.

A Legacy of Film Class Warfare

In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the tough residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.

There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, 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 updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.

The Catharsis That Alters Little

However, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials follow a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.

If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of largely uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

An Angrier Message in 2025

Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility 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 mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."

The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.

Key Outliers

There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid