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A familiar theme runs through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.

A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while using deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, needless to say.

It is not especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From 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 greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Fails to Transform

However, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion elected officials follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.

In fact, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a regular dose of mostly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

A More Pointed Edge in 2025

Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."

The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.

Key Exceptions

Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer 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* forfeits 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