Americans are once again paying for the 2008 financial collapse. This time, though, it’s willingly.
Entertainment industry executives and publishers say there is a growing audience for movies, plays, television shows and novels that address the misdeeds and systemic failures that brought the economy to the edge of collapse eight years ago.
The Big Short , which is based on a nonfiction bestseller by Michael Lewis, has earned more than $100 million at the box office worldwide. Accordingly, there are movies in development with titles that pretty much give away their plots: Smoke and Mirrors , All We Had and Straight to Hell.
“These projects are not operating in a vacuum,” said Len Amato, president of HBO Films. HBO has a movie about Bernard L Madoff coming out in 2017. ABC’s two-part miniseries Madoff aired last week.
“You can see what’s happening in the political process — both parties are dealing with grassroots movements standing up against the shrinking of the middle class and the rise of income inequality,” Amato said. “Audiences are not only ready to take that on in television and movies, they very much want to understand how we came to this point.”
In Money Monster , a thriller set for release in May, George Clooney plays a hyperbolic, Jim Cramer-esque host of a cable show. Held at gunpoint by a viewer who lost all his savings in a market plunge, Clooney’s character is forced to investigate a financial conspiracy. “I’m telling you it’s rigged,” the gunman says in the trailer. “They’re stealing everything from us, and they’re getting away with it, too.”
The movie’s anti-Wall Street theme echoes across the spectrum of popular culture. The market crash threatens to destroy a publishing house run by the hero of Jay McInerney’s latest novel, Bright, Precious Things , to be published later this year. In March, the Public Theater in New York will host the debut of Dry Powder , a sardonic take on private equity shenanigans that stars John Krasinski ( The Office ) and Claire Danes ( Homeland ).
A few years ago, there was less appetite for art that delved into the inner workings of the financial industry. Writers and directors delivered nonfiction books about the disaster and documentaries like the 2010 film Inside Job , but by and large entertainment executives seemed to doubt that audiences would spend money to relive how they lost so much of it.
Margin Call , a 2011 drama about the disintegration of an investment bank at the start of the crisis, was a critical success but not a popular one. It took in less than $20 million worldwide, and more than 70 percent of its audience was overseas, according to Box Office Mojo. (By contrast, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part I grossed $712 million worldwide that year.)
“We were like a depressed Catholic family avoiding the subject at dinner,” said Adam McKay, who directed and co-wrote The Big Short , which is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. “But people are realising that all those problems that caused the crash are still around.”
Film historians liken this lag to the ones that followed the Vietnam War and the 1929 stock market crash. Movies were made about those events in real time, but the most powerful ones came years later. The Deer Hunter and Coming Home were released in 1978; Apocalypse Now came out in 1979. Classic films about the Great Depression, like Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe and John Ford’s Grapes of Wrath , didn’t make it to the screen until World War II was underway.
“After a cataclysmic event, it takes awhile for the collective unconscious to bubble to the surface,” said Brian Koppelman, one of the creators of Billions , a new Showtime series about a hedge fund titan under investigation by a crusading US attorney.
Billions is set in the present, but like many other contemporary financial dramas, it is darkened by the shadow of 2008. For one thing, Koppelman noted, viewers today are more prepared to digest the details of what went wrong. “We have all learned the language. In 2008, who knew what a ‘tranche’ was?” he said.
The Big Short ends with a written warning that Wall Street could be repeating its mistakes: “In 2015, several large banks began selling billions in something called a ‘bespoke tranche opportunity,’” referring to the apparent rebranding of the complex securities at the heart of the 2008 mess. The movie, which stars Brad Pitt, Christian Bale and Steve Carell, looks like a sure thing now, but McKay said it took a few years to persuade the studio to greenlight it. “They worried that the material was too esoteric and wonky, but they were more open once we found a way to make it entertaining,” he said. —NYT
