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A familiar idea runs through many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.

A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare

In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — to make money, of course.

It is not especially new in a run of movies presupposing 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 theme dates back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog 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 refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.

The Catharsis That Changes Nothing

However, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the reverse.

Actually, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of largely uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.

A More Pointed Message in 2025

Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more fatal. 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 lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.

Key Exclusions

A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled 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 transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid