A little less than two months after 1987’s Black Monday, the worst global stock market crash since the Great Depression, Wall Street was released in theaters. As the Dow attempted to recoup some of the 22.6 percent that it had dropped in a single trading session and people around the globe grappled with the consequences of the elusive financial world, a movie illuminating the amoral intricacies of Wall Street made its way to the big screen. Suddenly, Wall Street was a much more palpable thing and an entirely new type of movie was born: the finance film.
While at first glance it might seem hard to find a compelling narrative in the minutiae of the stock market, many films since Wall Street have managed to succeed. While some truly fictional works have emerged, the financial film canon feeds on true events and succeeds most when it’s rooted in reality. The volatility of the market has provided an endless source of material, after all, with the 2007-2008 global financial crisis alone inspiring almost half of the financial films on this list.
The 2021 GameStop short squeeze is just the latest event to inspire a movie, Dumb Money, which hits theaters everywhere this week. Directed by Craig Gillespie, the film chronicles the wild saga of the squeeze, which rocked the stock market when Redditors drove up the price of what had previously been considered a lost-cause investment and a remnant of a bygone pre-digital download era. Clever, funny, and genuinely thrilling, the movie has all of the hallmarks of an epic finance film. In honor of the release of Dumb Money, we’ve rounded up some of the best finance films to premiere since the subgenre first found an audience 36 years ago.
Wall Street (1987)
Set against the intoxicating all-or-nothing backdrop of 1980s Wall Street, Wall Street was the first movie to truly capture the glitz, glam, and danger of the stock market. The film follows young, hungry junior stockbroker Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) as he attempts to worm his way into a working relationship with Wall Street legend Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). In a desperate attempt to appease the older man, Bud shares some insider information, which pays off handsomely for Gekko. The two kick off a toxic, insider-trading-fueled partnership that ultimately underscores the dangers of greed and excess. While the movie features fictional characters, bucking the trend of most successful finance films, the main players are composites of several Wall Street players (including director Oliver Stone’s stockbroker father).
Rogue Trader (1999)
Despite the massive success of Wall Street, it didn’t spawn an immediate crop of copycats. Over a decade later, Rogue Trader was one of the first financial films of substance to make its way into theaters. Based on the true story of Nick Leeson’s risky and unauthorized trading on the SIMEX exchange in 1995, which resulted in the shocking bankruptcy of Barings Bank, the movie skews more toward thriller than Wall Street. Ewan McGregor stars as Leeson and chronicles the man’s meteoric rise and subsequent fall as he hid more than £800 million in losses, effectively ending one of the oldest merchant banks in England and causing global financial distress. While the film creates an interesting enough narrative with Leeson’s fraudulent work, the most enticing part of Rogue Trader comes as Leeson and his wife (Anna Friel) attempt to flee Singapore after the bank goes bust.
Boiler Room (2000)
When Seth Davis (Giovanni Ribisi) — who runs an unlicensed casino out of his home — is recruited to work at brokerage firm J.T. Marlin, he sees it as an opportunity to impress his family who disapprove of his vocation. Seth finds success there but also realizes that his firm is a chop shop that essentially scams investors. When he learns that J.T. Marlin’s founders are planning to cut ties with the firm and destroy evidence of their wrongdoing, Seth teams up with his federal judge father to scam the firm back via an IPO scheme in an effort to help get the investors some of their money back. If any parts of the story seem familiar, it’s worth noting that The Wolf of Wall Street’s Jordan Belfort (more on that later) went on to claim that Boiler Room was loosely inspired by his life (although writer-director Ben Younger says it isn’t so).
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)
What better plot to hinge the return of Wall Street on than the 2008 financial crisis? Where the first movie was set amidst the insane success of ’80s Wall Street, the follow-up plays on the downfall of the stock market and global financial catastrophe. In Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Gordon Gekko is released from prison and publishes a book where he predicts upcoming economic decline. At the same time, his estranged daughter Winnie (Michelle Williams) is dating a talented young prop trader named Jake (Shia LaBeouf). Jake strikes up a relationship with Gordon and attempts to reconcile father and daughter in exchange for information about his own company. But Gekko, proving that some things never change, has some ulterior motives.
Limitless (2011)
While this might seem like an unconventional choice at the outset, Limitless was able to highlight the near-inhuman perception skills required to continually succeed on Wall Street. When struggling writer Eddie (Bradley Cooper) tries out a new unregulated nootropic drug, NZT-48, he acquires an unparalleled gift for recall and analysis. As soon as he can get his hands on more, he begins investing in stocks, and his newfound pattern identification skillset is put on full display. He gets hired at a brokerage firm and eventually even catches the attention of businessman Carl Van Loon (Robert De Niro), who is intrigued by Eddie’s financial skills and the concept of NZT. When Eddie begins to realize that everyone on NZT is either dead or dying and that other users are desperate for more pills to a murderous degree, it becomes a fight for his life. While the movie is more than anything a science fiction thriller, the stock trading aspect is one of the more fascinating parts of it, as it highlights that share prices often have more to do with public perception and psychology than actual corporate success.
Too Big to Fail (2011)
Just as the 2007 to 2008 financial crisis changed the world, it also changed financial films and reinvigorated the subgenre. Most movies in the years immediately following the financial crisis attempted to unpack the same thing: How the hell could this have happened? Based on journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book of the same name, Too Big to Fail details the initial attempts to abate the financial crisis when the housing bubble began to burst. The movie looks at the financial leaders, from Wall Street to the White House, who worked to bail out the big banks with the Troubled Asset Relief Program in an effort to stabilize the United States’ financial situation. Unfortunately, a lack of oversight in TARP legislation meant that many of the banks that received loans went on to give big bonuses to executives, sewing distrust among everyday Americans.
Margin Call (2011)
Margin Call centers on an unnamed investment bank over a 24-hour period right as the financial crisis starts. Amid widespread layoffs, the firm cuts loose its risk management lead (Stanley Tucci) who had been developing a model that predicted the danger of the bank’s stake in mortgage-back securities. Leaving a co-worker (Zachary Quinto) with a flash drive of his findings, the firm eventually comes to realize that it’s overleveraged and in grave danger of bankruptcy if it doesn’t dump its most toxic assets. The bosses acknowledge that by getting rid of the assets in a fire sale, they’d be wrecking their relationships and contributing to the inevitable economic crisis. They do it anyway and somewhat save themselves to the detriment of everyone else. By focusing on one fictional firm over one night, the movie provides an intimate portrait of corporate greed and the lack of public interest considered during the crisis.
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
One of the most enthralling depictions of Wall Street in all of its ’80s and ’90s insanity, Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street chronicles the rise and fall of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio). After his firm shutters on Black Monday, newbie stockbroker Jordan takes a job selling Penny Stocks in a boiler room brokerage firm and hones his borderline-illegal sales skills. He eventually starts his own firm, Stratton Oakmont, with his neighbor Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) and the two find immense success in their pump-and-dump schemes. As Jordan begins to indulge in the coke-fueled partying side of Wall Street, he also starts to partake in increasingly illegal actions, ultimately attracting the attention of the SEC and FBI and leading to his downfall.
The Big Short (2015)
Seven years after the financial crisis decimated the economy, The Big Short (based on Michael Lewis’s book of the same name) was able to shed some light onto the very early days of the crisis and the people who figured it out before anyone else. When Dr. Michael Burry (Christian Bale) notices that there’s a surplus of subprime mortgage loans, he predicts that the housing market is a bubble about to burst and invests his hedge fund accordingly. While initially seen as a loose canon by fearful investors, a few other key Wall Street players, like the Steve Eisman–inspired Mark Baum (Steve Carell) and Greg Lippmann–inspired Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), catch wind and attempt to suss out whether something as historically reliable as mortgage-backed securities could actually result in economic collapse. With witty turn-to-the-camera sidebars and several celebrity explainers (including Margot Robbie, Anthony Bourdain, and Selena Gomez), Adam McKay’s first dramatic directorial venture manages to expertly detail what went wrong in lively, palatable ways.
Money Monster (2016)
One of the few films to make this list that is not based at least loosely on a true story, Money Monster brings an imminent physical threat to Wall Street. When Lee Gates (George Clooney), the host of financial talk show Money Monster (think Jim Cramer’s Mad Money) hosts a live episode the day after a stock he endorsed plummeted due to an apparent algorithm glitch, a disgruntled investor makes his way on-air with a gun and a bomb vest and holds Gates hostage. Gates eventually sympathizes with the man and works, alongside his producer (Julia Roberts), to find out what happened and if fraud is to blame, rather than just algorithmic error. Directed by Jodie Foster, the movie underscores that what might seem like chump change or simply a game for those on Wall Street is truly a matter of life and death for most everyday people.
The Wizard of Lies (2017)
Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, totaling more than $64 billion, remains the largest known Ponzi scheme in history and was one of the devastating contributing factors to the 2008 Wall Street pandemonium. While a number of documentaries and miniseries attempted to capture just what went down leading up to his 2008 arrest and how someone could have gotten away with fraud on such a destructive level, it was HBO’s The Wizard of Lies that finally pulled it off. Starring Robert De Niro, the movie is more than a look at Madoff’s inner workings and family. His wife, Ruth (Michelle Pfeiffer), and sons, Mark (Alessandro Nivola) and Andrew (Nathan Darrow), are just as much in the spotlight as the man himself, and the film ultimately serves as a familial character study.
Hustlers (2019)
While The Big Short and other films about the 2008 financial crisis were able to detail how it happened, few looked closely at the regular people affected by the crisis and its economic ripples throughout the world. Inspired by a New York story, Hustlers follows a group of strippers (helmed by Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu) who find themselves financially suffering when their usual clientele scale back after the financial crisis along with the rest of the world. Struggling to get by, they begin drugging their clients (mostly Wall Street guys) and maxing out the men’s credit cards at their strip club before taking a cut of the profit. Straddling the line between hustle and greed, Hustlers became one of the best, most unexpected movies about the financial crisis and its labyrinth of repercussions.
Dumb Money (2023)
Following a relative dearth of finance movies, Dumb Money has emerged as one of the best and most enticing entries into the financial film canon. As opposed to most of the other Wall Street tales on this list, Dumb Money sees a happy ending for the (relatively) little guy — in this case, retail traders. At the center of the GameStop storm was Keith Gill (Paul Dano), who pumped his entire savings into the stock simply because he believed it was undervalued. Posting and sharing videos through the r/wallstreetbets Reddit page, Gill gathered a following, and people began to invest in GameStop, slowly inflating the price and panicking Wall Street bigwigs who had shorted the stock. While the movie is centered on Gill and the impacted hedge funds, it smartly highlights a variety of sympathetic amateur investors (the people who usually get screwed over in these movies) who are able to walk away with something to show for themselves. More than anything, Dumb Money accurately captures the punchy, whirlwind feel of COVID-era online communities and frustration with the ultrarich and powerful.