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A familiar theme permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.

A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy

In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while using AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — to make money, naturally.

There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.

The Outlet That Alters Little

And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers follow a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.

In fact, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of mostly triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Tone in 2025

But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."

The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Exceptions

There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, 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 reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid