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An age-old idea runs through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches far back to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.

A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.

It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people 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 perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, 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 updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Alters Little

However, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the daily reports reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.

If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of largely triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.

A More Pointed Tone in 2025

But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*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 up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."

The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.

Significant Exclusions

A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, 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 reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid