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A recurring motif courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their financial benefit.

A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain operating a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing digital impersonations and a powerful media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters reside in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.

There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. 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 greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.

The Outlet That Fails to Transform

And yet, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.

Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.

A More Pointed Message in 2025

But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."

The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.

Significant Exclusions

Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled 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 reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid