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A familiar idea courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.

A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.

There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.

The Release That Alters Little

And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the news reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.

If anything, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Offered a steady diet of mostly triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.

A More Pointed Message in 2025

Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful 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, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*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 corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich 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 highly probable to negotiate their release."

The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Notable Exceptions

There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid