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An age-old motif permeates numerous 2025's popular films. This concept which extends all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.

A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — to make money, naturally.

It is not especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.

The Catharsis That Changes Nothing

However, inexplicably, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials respond to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying the reverse.

In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

A More Pointed Tone in 2025

But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."

The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.

Key Exceptions

A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of 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