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A familiar motif permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.

A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity

In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.

It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.

The Release That Fails to Transform

However, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the news reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.

Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes real-world action. Given a regular dose of largely uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

An Angrier Message in 2025

Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, 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, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.

Significant Exceptions

A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. 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 thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid