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An age-old theme runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes far back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.

A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated smear campaign to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.

There is little especially new in a string of movies presupposing that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, 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 revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.

The Release That Alters Little

Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.

In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.

A Sharper Message in 2025

Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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 wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."

The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.

Notable Outliers

There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously 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 wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid