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A recurring motif runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.

A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.

There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. From 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 tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.

The Catharsis That Changes Nothing

Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with competence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying the reverse.

Actually, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of largely uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

An Angrier Tone in 2025

Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."

The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Key Exceptions

Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid