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An age-old motif courses through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.

A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity

In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury 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 top box-office hit, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.

There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.

The Catharsis That Alters Little

However, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.

If anything, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

A More Pointed Tone in 2025

Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to 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" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.

Key Outliers

Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid