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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 the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.

A Legacy of Film Elite Villainy

In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the scrappy residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about planetary doom — to make money, naturally.

There is little especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.

The Release That Alters Little

However, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.

If anything, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

An Angrier Message in 2025

But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."

The "off to face justice" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.

Significant Exclusions

A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid