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A familiar theme permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes far back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.

A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy

In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.

There is little inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.

The Release That Alters Little

And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers react to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.

In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of largely uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

A More Pointed Edge in 2025

Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and observably 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."

The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.

Key Outliers

Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. 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 unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid