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A recurring theme runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to trap the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.

A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy

In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.

It is not especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Alters Little

Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.

In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of mostly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.

A More Pointed Message in 2025

Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."

The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Exceptions

There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the digital realm, 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 redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid