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A familiar idea courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.

A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare

In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.

It is not especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.

The Release That Fails to Transform

Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians follow a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.

Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of mostly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.

An Angrier Edge in 2025

Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, 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 rich individuals were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."

The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.

Notable Exceptions

There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid