A recurring idea permeates numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes far back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people living in extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the daily reports demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Given a steady diet of largely triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
