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An age-old motif runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.

A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.

It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.

The Release That Alters Little

However, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the daily reports reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with competence and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.

Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.

A Sharper Message in 2025

Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to buy their way out."

The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.

Significant Exclusions

Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of 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