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A recurring idea permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends back in time to the time of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.

A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity

In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.

It is not inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Changes Nothing

And yet, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.

If anything, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of largely triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.

An Angrier Tone in 2025

But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Notable Exceptions

Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid