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An age-old motif courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes back in time to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.

A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy

In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the zany humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.

There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. 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 tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of elite figures.

The Catharsis That Fails to Transform

Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.

In fact, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of mostly triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Edge in 2025

But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."

The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Outliers

A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid