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A familiar motif permeates many of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.

A Lineage of Film Wealth Disparity

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its villains live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.

There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. 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 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 basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.

The Release That Alters Little

Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers follow a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.

If anything, it appears that the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of largely triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Edge in 2025

Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."

The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.

Notable Outliers

There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid