An age-old idea runs through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, sets the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time politicians react to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying a contradictory message.
In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of largely triumphant stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more specific, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
