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An age-old theme courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes back in time to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy 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 Cinematic Elite Villainy

In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, 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 condescending upper classes who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.

It is not inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.

The Catharsis That Fails to Transform

Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the daily reports reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.

In fact, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a regular dose of largely triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.

A More Pointed Message in 2025

But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."

The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Key Outliers

Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid