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A familiar theme courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.

A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.

There is little especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.

The Catharsis That Changes Nothing

And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians react to a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.

In fact, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of mostly triumphant tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.

A Sharper Edge in 2025

Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.

Key Outliers

Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid