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A recurring theme permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes far back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.

A Lineage of Film Class Warfare

In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its villains live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.

There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. 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 entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.

The Catharsis That Alters Little

And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.

In fact, it looks as though the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of largely uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.

An Angrier Tone in 2025

Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."

The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Key Outliers

Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid