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An age-old idea courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that stretches back in time to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their own profit.

A Tradition of Film Class Warfare

In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its villains live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.

It is not inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.

The Outlet That Alters Little

Nevertheless, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and importance, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.

Actually, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Given a frequent serving of mostly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.

A Sharper Tone in 2025

Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, 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 affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."

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

Significant Exceptions

Some films diverge, undoubtedly. 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, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid