A recurring idea courses through many of 2025's popular films. It's an idea that goes far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. But the news reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of largely triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. 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 revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
