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A familiar motif permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.

A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy

In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them out of jobs and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.

It is not especially new in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.

The Catharsis That Fails to Transform

Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time politicians react to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.

Actually, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.

A Sharper Tone in 2025

Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays 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, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by different standards, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.

Significant Exclusions

Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid