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A familiar motif courses through many of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.

A Tradition of Film Class Warfare

In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.

It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.

The Catharsis That Changes Nothing

However, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers react to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.

Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes real-world action. Given a frequent serving of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Tone in 2025

Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."

The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.

Significant Outliers

Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid