How The Big Short Hollywood-ized the Financial Collapse

The Big Short—based on Michael Lewis’s account of the 2008 financial crisis and directed by Will Ferrell’s writing partner, Adam McKay—is a ruthless takedown of Wall Street disguised as a snarky Hollywood romp. In the movie, a group of renegade brokers and traders bet against the housing market and make a killing while the rest of the finance world weeps. Fun! The way those renegades did it, however, presents a very big filmmaking problem: How do you dramatize a series of financial trades so convoluted, so abstruse, that even the people in on the deals didn’t always understand what was going on?

The answer: celebrity cameos and diagrams. Lots of them. To help the audience follow along, McKay periodically stops the action for brief financial tutorials. Sultry actress Margot Robbie defines subprime mortgages while sipping Champagne in a bubble bath. Anthony Bourdain shows up to compare the way banks packaged the bad mortgages into top-rated bonds to how a shifty cook might trick people into eating three-day-old fish by dumping it in a stew. Selena Gomez visits a Vegas casino with economist Richard Thaler to explain collateralized debt obligations. In one scene, a Deutsche Bank trader loosely based on the real-life Greg Lippmann and played by Ryan Gosling explains the housing market’s vulnerabilities using a game of Jenga.