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A familiar idea permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.

A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.

It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.

The Catharsis That Fails to Transform

And yet, somehow, we never get around to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the headlines reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to competence and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.

Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Given a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

An Angrier Message in 2025

Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."

The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.

Significant Exclusions

There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, 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 redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid