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A familiar motif courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.

A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy

In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while using AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.

There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.

The Catharsis That Changes Nothing

However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the news reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.

If anything, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Given a steady diet of largely uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.

An Angrier Message in 2025

But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and apparently more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*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 super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."

The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.

Notable Outliers

A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid