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An age-old motif courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.

A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy

In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.

There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning 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 exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.

The Outlet That Alters Little

And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever politicians react to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the headlines reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying the reverse.

Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of largely uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.

A More Pointed Edge in 2025

But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.

Notable Outliers

There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid