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A familiar idea runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.

A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare

In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.

There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.

The Catharsis That Changes Nothing

Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. But the daily reports reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.

In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a regular dose of mostly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.

An Angrier Tone in 2025

Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with different standards, and are very likely to negotiate their release."

The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.

Key Exceptions

A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid