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A familiar motif courses through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.

A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity

In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.

There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.

The Catharsis That Alters Little

Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers react to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the news reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.

Actually, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting 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 through sheer effort.

An Angrier Message in 2025

But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Notable Exceptions

There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid