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A familiar theme runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.

A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy

In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — to make money, of course.

There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.

The Catharsis That Alters Little

However, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.

Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of largely uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Tone in 2025

Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."

The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Exclusions

Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid