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A familiar motif permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire wielding his enormous resources to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to trap the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.

A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, contrasts the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.

There is little especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his always poor iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with 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 rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.

The Outlet That Fails to Transform

And yet, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the daily reports makes it obvious regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.

Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of predominantly triumphant fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.

A Sharper Message in 2025

Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and observably more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days 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 oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*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 ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."

The "off to face justice" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.

Notable Exceptions

Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid