A familiar theme runs through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion which extends back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to trap the heroes into a monster-filled death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever politicians respond to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of largely triumphant fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film content about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people operate under different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
