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A recurring idea courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.

A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, contrasts the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.

There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.

The Release That Fails to Transform

However, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion politicians react to a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.

If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

An Angrier Edge in 2025

Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."

The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.

Notable Exceptions

Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid