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A recurring idea courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches far back to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.

A Lineage of Film Class Warfare

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while employing digital impersonations and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, pits the tough people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.

There’s nothing inherently notable in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.

The Release That Fails to Transform

However, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Whenever elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the daily reports reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.

If anything, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Tone in 2025

But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."

The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.

Significant Exclusions

A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid