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A familiar idea permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.

A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its evil characters live in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing 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 people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.

There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Fails to Transform

And yet, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.

Actually, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Message in 2025

Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.

Significant Exceptions

A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid