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A familiar idea permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept which extends all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.

A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy

In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.

There is little inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.

The Release That Fails to Transform

However, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.

If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that impedes substantive reform. Given a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

A More Pointed Message in 2025

Although 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility 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 wealthy people were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."

The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.

Key Exceptions

A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, 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 reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid