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An age-old theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.

A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy

In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.

There is little especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.

The Outlet That Alters Little

However, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the daily reports reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.

Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.

A Sharper Message in 2025

But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.

Significant Outliers

A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid