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An age-old motif runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.

A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while using digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the tough residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — to make money, naturally.

There is little especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.

The Outlet That Fails to Transform

And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.

If anything, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of largely uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Edge in 2025

Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."

The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.

Significant Exceptions

Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid