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A recurring idea runs through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept which extends back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.

A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — to make money, of course.

There is little inherently notable in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Alters Little

And yet, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.

Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.

A More Pointed Tone in 2025

Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."

The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Key Exclusions

There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid