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A familiar theme runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends far back to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.

A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare

In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.

It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.

The Release That Fails to Transform

And yet, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever lawmakers react to a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually 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 revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.

In fact, it seems like the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that impedes real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of mostly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.

A More Pointed Tone in 2025

Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."

The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.

Key Outliers

There are exceptions, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid