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A familiar motif courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their financial benefit.

A Legacy of Film Class Warfare

In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, contrasts the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.

There is little inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.

The Outlet That Alters Little

However, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.

If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of predominantly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Tone in 2025

Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more direct, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."

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

Significant Exceptions

There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid