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An age-old motif runs through many of 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.

A Legacy of Film Class Warfare

In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the tough people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.

There is little inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Alters Little

Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials react to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.

If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a frequent serving of mostly triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Edge in 2025

Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."

The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Key Outliers

Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid