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A familiar theme courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.

A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity

In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the resourceful people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.

There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.

The Outlet That Alters Little

However, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. On each occasion politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.

If anything, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Given a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.

A More Pointed Tone in 2025

Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, 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 fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."

The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Exceptions

There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. 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 revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid