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An age-old idea courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This notion which extends back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing tens of millions to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.

A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare

In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — to make money, of course.

There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Alters Little

And yet, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians react to a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.

In fact, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders substantive reform. Given a steady diet of predominantly uplifting tales where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.

A Sharper Tone in 2025

Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more fatal. 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 forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."

The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.

Significant Exclusions

A few stories differ, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid