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A recurring idea runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.

A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy

In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, of course.

There is little inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.

The Outlet That Fails to Transform

However, for some reason, we never actually eating the rich. Every time politicians react to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately link affluence to competence and value to society, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.

Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of largely uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.

A More Pointed Tone in 2025

But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."

The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.

Key Outliers

Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the digital realm, where he’s clearly 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 thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid