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A recurring theme permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.

A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare

In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.

There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, 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 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 assume that riches is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.

The Release That Alters Little

Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.

In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.

A Sharper Message in 2025

But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people function with a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.

Significant Exceptions

There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid