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An age-old idea permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends back in time to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.

A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare

In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the tough residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.

There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, 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 the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Changes Nothing

However, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the daily reports reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.

If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Given a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.

An Angrier Message in 2025

But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough 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, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.

Key Exclusions

Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid