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A recurring motif courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes far back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.

A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.

There is little inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.

The Catharsis That Fails to Transform

However, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.

In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Given a steady diet of mostly triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Message in 2025

But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, 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 devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."

The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.

Notable Exceptions

A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid