A recurring theme courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that goes all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.
There is little inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
However, for some reason, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports reveals every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and importance, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders substantive reform. Given a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
