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A familiar motif permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.

A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.

It is not especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, authority figures, 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 updated that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.

The Catharsis That Changes Nothing

However, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials follow a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the news reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and importance, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.

Actually, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Offered a regular dose of mostly uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify 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 aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among class warfare 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 about modesty, 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 obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."

The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.

Notable Outliers

A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid