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An age-old motif permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.

A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare

In *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.

It is not especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.

The Catharsis That Fails to Transform

However, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the daily reports reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.

Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Given a steady diet of largely triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.

A Sharper Edge in 2025

But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility 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 wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people function with different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."

The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.

Key Exceptions

There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid