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An age-old idea permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.

A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — to make money, naturally.

There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. From 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 entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.

The Outlet That Alters Little

However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials follow a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the news makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.

In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.

An Angrier Message in 2025

Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."

The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Exceptions

Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid