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A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes back in time to the time of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.

A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gleaming towers above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.

There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, 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 revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.

The Release That Changes Nothing

Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.

If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of predominantly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.

A Sharper Edge in 2025

But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."

The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.

Key Outliers

There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid