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A familiar theme courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes far back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.

A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity

In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.

There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.

The Release That Alters Little

And yet, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.

If anything, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.

An Angrier Tone in 2025

Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.

Key Exclusions

There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid