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An age-old theme permeates numerous 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.

A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy

In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its antagonists live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit opulent sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.

It is not especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.

The Catharsis That Alters Little

And yet, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.

If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.

A Sharper Edge in 2025

Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."

The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Key Exclusions

Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid