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A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.

A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy

In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.

There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.

The Release That Changes Nothing

And yet, for some reason, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.

Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a steady diet of largely uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.

A Sharper Message in 2025

Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a 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, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.

Notable Exceptions

A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid