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A recurring motif permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.

A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.

There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.

The Release That Fails to Transform

And yet, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.

If anything, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Given a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.

A Sharper Message in 2025

But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful 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, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."

The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Key Exceptions

A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid