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An age-old idea runs through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.

A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy

In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, naturally.

There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From 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 tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.

The Catharsis That Alters Little

Nevertheless, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, 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 — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the news makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.

In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Given a regular dose of largely uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.

A Sharper Message in 2025

But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.

Significant Outliers

There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid