the big short movie review

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The pre-release buzz is true: This is not your father’s financial crisis movie. Nor, for that matter, is it “ The Wolf of Wall Street .” The money masters of the universe depicted in this film—and while their stories are interconnected, their lives are not, necessarily—barely drink a sufficient amount of red wine to get a good buzz on. Their buzz derives from an enhanced sense of smell. The closest to a “ Wolf ”-like character here is Ryan Gosling ’s Jared Vennett, the most standard-issue suit-and-tie banking bro of the bunch, and part of his schtick is to stand in a conference room sniffing ostentatiously because, yes, he smells money.

The money smelt, and earned, by the adventurers of this story of the real-life 2008 world economic meltdown is arguably tainted by bad karma. Based on a book by Michael Lewis , “The Big Short” is about how several traders and hedge fund managers made fortunes because they saw that the housing market’s decline would cause a collapse of bonds contrived from sub-prime mortgages. The terminology is both dry and dizzying, the machinations incredibly convoluted. The main thesis of the story, adapted for the screen by director Adam McKay and his co-screenwriter Charles Randolph , is that as banking became the top industry of the United States, bankers deliberately concocted Byzantine financial tools whose main function was to help the rich get richer and screw over the little guy. You can expect a lot of pushback against this film of the “where do these affluent Hollywood types get off criticizing income inequality” but that won’t mean the movie is wrong.

And it really is quite a movie: entertaining and engaging, but also mortifying; a good alternate title might be “American Horror Story.” The film intertwines three discrete storylines. The first focuses on Christian Bale ’s Michael Burry, a trained physician with very stunted social skills whose genius at analysis and numbers-crunching found him running a very successful West Coast hedge fund. After finding some terrifying data within the structures of a large number of mortgage bonds, he concocts a radical idea: to “short,” that is, bet against, the housing bond market, which the banks have puffed up as being unassailable. To do this he has to convince those banks to create a new financial tool, a kind of bond insurance policy. If Burry’s right and the market collapses, he and his hedge fund make stupid money. But for as long as the market stays stable, Burry and his fund are obliged to pay stupid money in premiums.

McKay is best known as the director of such comedic fare as “Anchorman,” and, for all the silly self-reflexive humor in those films, there’s a sly underlying intelligence animating them, and here that takes the form of celebrity cameos wherein attractive people such as Margot Robbie and Selena Gomez directly address the audience with cogent and colorful explanations of terms such as “sub-prime.” He also enlists “Anchorman” rep company member Steve Carell for one main role, as financial Prophet of Doom Mark Baum, whose own fund gets a whiff of what Gosling’s character is smelling and takes a piece of the action, in a partial fit of “screw the system” indignation. Carell’s self-torturing character is likely the closest thing this movie has to a directorial surrogate. Finn Wittrock and John Magaro play a couple of Jim Henson’s Hedge Fund Babies, mentored by Brad Pitt ’s Ben Rickert. Rickert’s character can be read as something of a slight sendup of Pitt’s own current do-gooder persona; he’s a former master trader who left the game out of disgust, and who preaches a hippie-ish quasi-survivalist gospel to his two young acolytes even as he helps them get pretty much super-rich.

I started off feeling skeptical about this movie: the hairstyles and clothes of the main characters were more ‘90s music-video than early 2000s, and the sometimes-color-desaturated flashbacks to some characters’ back stories were a little on the drearily commonplace side. But the narrative momentum, combined with the profane wit of much of the dialogue, and the committed acting going on beneath the hairpieces, all did their job. And they got across the angry, pessimistic conviction behind the movie, which is that the major banks all engaged in fraudulent, criminal activity, and that the U.S. government bailed them out at the expense of the little guy, and that there’s no indication that the banks aren’t going to do something like the exact same thing all over again. You are free to disagree. But this is a movie that uses both cinema art and irrefutable facts to make its case. It’s strong stuff.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

The Big Short (2015)

Rated R for pervasive language and some sexuality/nudity.

130 minutes

Christian Bale as Michael Burry

Brad Pitt as Ben Rickert

Ryan Gosling as Jared Vennett

Steve Carell as Mark Baum

Melissa Leo as Georgia Hale

Karen Gillan as Evie

Marisa Tomei as Cynthia Baum

Tracy Letts as Lawrence Fields

Finn Wittrock as Jamie Shipley

John Magaro as Charlie Geller

Rafe Spall as Danny Moses

Hamish Linklater as Porter Collins

Byron Mann as Mr. Chau

Al Sapienza as Dan Detone

Jeremy Strong as Vinny Daniel

Michael Lewis
Charles Randolph

Director of Photography

Barry Ackroyd
Brent White
Nicholas Britell

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The Big Short Reviews

Headlined by a star-studded cast, this legitimate must-see film tip-toes audaciously between biting satire and topical cautionary tale. You won't know whether to be pissed or be entertained and that's a powerful quality to pull off.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 16, 2024

'The Big Short' is the film that we needed at this time.

Full Review | Aug 27, 2023

Trying to keep up with all of the fast market talk and financial blather wore me down. And there’s so much emphasis on it that the movie comes off as overstuffed and missing the human element which would have given it a more powerful punch.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 19, 2022

McKay's defiant treatment just barely avoids becoming so irreverent that its sense of humor overshadows its significance.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 25, 2022

Both annoying and effective as McKay manages to simultaneously inform and talk down to his audience.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 15, 2021

The filmmakers do their best to bring this crisis and its human dimensions to life.

Full Review | Feb 26, 2021

Though presented as a jet black, indeed a cold-hearted, satire, it's concerned with reminding American audiences in particular just how close they came to economic Armageddon.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 14, 2021

Subtle it's not, but the director's use of pop culture images and music to set the scene goes a long way to establish a time, place and tone.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 3, 2021

It manages to illuminate how the economic failure occurred with scathing wit and highly-stylized editing that keeps you on your toes.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jan 30, 2021

The Big Short is both the defining film about the most recent financial crisis and the defining film of its director's young career so far.

Full Review | Jan 7, 2021

The Big Short is a remarkable piece of cinema and nothing seems to change.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 23, 2020

Even a talented cast cannot make this labyrinthine topic fully understandable unless the viewer is already modestly familiar with the subject matter.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 16, 2020

There isn't a sense of winning or losing - merely weathering the periods of time when the villainy of banks and the government are at their most extreme.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 4, 2020

The Big Short is as informative, insightful and innovative as it is drop dead entertaining.

Full Review | Oct 27, 2020

The Big Short keeps the narrative popping for a wealth of the run time.

Full Review | Apr 7, 2020

The standout, however, is Steve Carell's righteously angry Baum. Carell was primarily known as a comic actor, but he's been moving towards drama for a while now...

Full Review | Feb 13, 2020

McKay's masterful sendup of late-stage capitalism will leave you saying, "Never again!"

Full Review | Jan 13, 2020

Smart, funny, scary, ingeniously populated and a rollicking good time, The Big Short was such a left-field bolt from the blue and an enormously entertaining few hours in the cinema.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 5, 2019

Steve Carell, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt lead an ensemble cast firing on all cylinders.

Full Review | Aug 8, 2019

Teems with self-awareness about the complexity of Wall Street while using that opportunity to inject dark humor into what's otherwise a frighteningly bleak reality.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.75/5 | Jul 20, 2019

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Film Review: ‘The Big Short’

Adam McKay's financial-crisis comedy turns a dense economics lecture into a hyper-caffeinated postmodern farce.

By Andrew Barker

Andrew Barker

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'The Big Short' Review: Adam McKay's Financial-Crisis Comedy

Of all the current century’s most cataclysmic world-historical events, the 2008 financial crisis is probably among the most poorly understood. Filmmakers looking to rectify this have already approached the story from a number of angles, from sober-minded documentary (“Inside Job”) to operatic boiler-room drama (“Margin Call”), but the route taken by “The Big Short” is by far the most radical, turning a dense economics lecture into a hyper-caffeinated postmodern farce, a spinach smoothie skillfully disguised as junk food. Taking style cues from hip-hop videos, Funny or Die clips and “The Office,” Adam McKay’s film hits its share of sour notes; some important plot points are nearly impossible for laypeople to decipher even with cheeky, fourth-wall-obliterating tutorials, and the combination of eye-crossing subject matter and nontraditional structure makes it a risky bet at the box office. But there’s an unmistakable, scathing sense of outrage behind the whole endeavor, and it’s impossible not to admire McKay’s reckless willingness to do everything short of jumping through flaming hoops on a motorcycle while reading aloud from Keynes if that’s what it takes to get people to finally pay attention.

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His seemingly insane investments create enough of a stir on Wall Street to attract the attention of alpha-douche banker Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling, who also serves as the film’s foul-mouthed narrator). Thanks to a fortuitous wrong number, Vennett winds up going into the credit-default-swap business with Mark Baum (Steve Carell, playing a fictionally named character), a self-hating hedge funder with a centimeter-long fuse. The potential windfall also interests the bumbling small-potatoes investment team of Charles Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock), who loop in a former banker-gone-New Age (Brad Pitt) to help get them a spot at the grown-ups’ table.

Despite sturdy, energetic performances from all the actors mentioned above, only Carell’s Baum manages to register as a genuine, empathetic character; not coincidentally, he’s also the only one to express believable compunctions about getting rich off a looming fiscal catastrophe. Indeed, despite its satirical bent, “The Big Short” often seems a bit too eager to present these men as sympathetic, when all they really did was prove to be smarter than the average investor about a downturn that caused so much misery for so many innocent people.

Simply balancing this many characters (there are also significant roles for Marisa Tomei, Adepero Oduye, Hamish Linklater, Rafe Spall and Jeremy Strong) would be difficult enough, but McKay is also tasked with talking his audience through immensely — and at times intentionally — esoteric financial products and procedures. Sometimes he does this through onscreen text, and at others he’ll halt the narrative to have attractive celebrities spell out terms like “synthetic collateralized debt obligation.” Aware of how quickly viewers can tire of watching terrible men in suits screaming jargon at each other, the director also splices in lightning-fast montages of period-appropriate pop culture and sometimes seemingly random imagery to keep up the pace. (Editor Hank Corwin more than earns his paycheck here with the sheer amount of visual information he’s managed to process, though the film could have done with a more low-key shooting approach than d.p. Barry Ackroyd’s somewhat exhausting camera movement.)

“The Big Short” is miles removed from McKay’s previous films like “Anchorman” and “Talladega Nights,” but a bit of their broadness remains, and his attempts at more subtle metaphorical commentary — an S&P analyst (Melissa Leo) with a vision condition, a drunken SEC agent (Karen Gillan) throwing herself at anyone with a Goldman Sachs business card — are way too on-the-nose. As it nears its final act, however, the film takes an effective turn for the serious, with even our cynical investor-heroes surprised to learn just how deep the institutional rot in the country’s financial systems really went.

And perhaps McKay’s hyperreal approach is exactly what this story needs, given how far removed from the reality-based community so many of the highest-paid financial gurus were at the time. (More than once, the film has to directly address the audience just to stress that, yes, the scene talking place actually did happen.) In the pic’s most viciously surreal sequence, Baum and company travel to Florida to see firsthand some of the mortgages that are threatening to go belly-up, finding cul-de-sacs full of abandoned houses, highly motivated McMansion sellers, and a pair of meatheaded mortgage consultants who chuckle over writing six-figure home loans for buyers with no income or down payment. Baum steps aside and consults with one of his agents. “Why are they confessing?” he asks, confused. “They’re not,” comes the reply. “They’re bragging.”

Reviewed at AFI Fest (closer), Los Angeles, Nov. 13, 2015. MPAA rating: R. Running time: 130 MIN.

Production: A Paramount release, presented with Regency Enterprises, of a Plan B Entertainment production. Produced by Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Arnan Milchan. Executive producers, Louise Rosner-Meyer, Kevin Messick.
Crew: Directed by Adam McKay. Screenplay, McKay, Charles Randolph, based on the book by Michael Lewis. Camera (color), Barry Ackroyd; editor, Hank Corwin; music, Nicholas Britell; production designer, Clayton Hartley; costume designer, Susan Matheson; art director, Elliott Glick; sound, David Wyman; supervising sound editor, Becky Sullivan; re-recording mixers, Anna Behlmer, Terry Porter; visual effects supervisor, Paul Linden; visual effects, Bylola, Industrial Light and Magic, assistant director, Matt Rebenkoff; casting, Francine Maisler.
With: Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, Marisa Tomei, Hamish Linklater, Rafe Spall, Jeremy Strong, Adepero Oduye, Karen Gillan, Max Greenfield, Billy Magnussen, Melissa Leo, Margot Robbie, Anthony Bourdain, Richard Thaler, Selena Gomez, John Magaro, Finn Wittrock, Byron Mann.

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Movie Review

The Big Short is The Wolf of Wall Street with a conscience

Adam mckay's foray into drama is weird, jittery, and mad as hell.

By Tasha Robinson
on December 10, 2015 09:30 am

Early on, The Big Short reveals its philosophy about keeping its audience engaged and clear on the issues: "It's pretty confusing, right? Does it make you feel bored? Or stupid? Well, it's supposed to. Wall Street loves to use confusing terms to make you think only they can do what they do. Or even better, for you just to leave them the fuck alone. So here's Margot Robbie in a bubble bath to explain." And up pops Robbie, sipping champagne in a candlelit tub, explaining sub-prime mortgages to a jazzily edited sequence.

Viewers who already fully understand the principles behind the economic crisis of 2007 may feel a little patronized by The Big Short , a film that bends over backward to explain it in small, simple words. But to the rest of us, everyone who gets glassy-eyed at talk of collateralized debt obligation and super-senior tranches, director Adam McKay is like that one fun science teacher who illustrated chemical reactions by blowing things up in class. It's a cutesy, gimmicky approach, but it's also friendly to the audience, and appealingly unexpected.

McKay seems like an odd choice to adapt Michael Lewis' best-selling financial world exposé The Big Short : Will Ferrell's frequent writing partner and director on Anchorman , Talladega Nights , Step Brothers , The Other Guys , and Anchorman 2 , McKay has a long history in improv-heavy comedy film, and something this tightly scripted, reality-focused, and significant seems like a stretch. But his visual looseness and speedy comic beats are a surprisingly perfect approach here. Lewis' books have been adapted before, with Moneyball and The Blind Side , and they're meant to be accessible to lay readers trying to understand how complicated issues make compelling stories. They've just never been this raucous, playful, and irreverent onscreen before.

McKay's film is coated in sugar, but it's a bitter pill to swallow

But while The Big Short is frequently hilarious, it isn't primarily a comedy. The story is about industry-wide corruption and misrepresentation. The financial crisis was enabled by criminal misrepresentation and a lack of oversight, and it resulted in millions of people losing their jobs, homes, and businesses, at staggering taxpayer expense. The film's theatrical trailer makes Big Short look like a star-studded heist movie just short of Ocean's Eleven , with a group of smart scallywags gleefully taking on a greedy banking industry and teaching the fat-cats a thing or two. But there's a deep, seething anger working under the surface of the film, at the laziness, selfishness, weakness, and indifference that drove the collapse. McKay's film is coated in sugar to make it go down easy, but at its center, it's a bitter pill to swallow.

Part of the sugar coating is a cast of familiar faces, inhabiting larger-than-life roles. Christian Bale plays hedge-fund manager Michael Burry as a barefoot, air-drumming metalhead savant who first sees the opportunity no one else sees, to "bet against the American economy" by shorting the housing market. Other characters are more invented: Steve Carell as Mark Baum (based on money manager Steve Eisman) is a bristly asshole who serves as an unlikely audience avatar, investigating the looming crisis stage by stage, and getting angrier and angrier on the world's behalf. Brad Pitt plays Ben Rickert (based on capital investor Ben Hockett) as a quietly paranoid outsider who made his millions and got out of the business, but gets pulled back in, heist-movie-style, by a couple of ambitious young up-and-comer traders (Finn Wittrock and John Magaro) who need his connections to make their business work. And Ryan Gosling plays Jared Vennett (based on trader Greg Lippmann), our smug narrator, who often explains what's going on directly to the camera, and uses a customized Jenga set to clearly illustrate what the housing market is about to do. They do look like a heist crew — colorful, prickly, individualistic fast talkers, each with a separate strength — except for the part where they largely aren't working together, or even working with the same intent.

The film works around the housing crisis from a variety of perspectives as all these characters dig into it, and that's part of its accessibility. Still, The Big Short is unmissably about a large, diffuse group of ultra-rich white men making unfathomable amounts of money by outthinking other rich white men. There's no hero, not necessarily even a likable character in the bunch, and the few women scattered through the story — Marisa Tomei as Baum's wife, Melissa Leo as a condescending Standard & Poor rep, Adepero Oduye as Baum's fund head — are hardly more than set dressing. The film barely takes two minutes for its only look at a real victim of all this chicanery, a Hispanic dad who's dutifully paying his rent, but whose landlord is about to lose his home to fraud anyway. The film's anger is real, but its focus is primarily on how that anger touches the privileged people who understand what's going on, and stand to benefit hugely from it, no matter how they feel about it personally.

In that sense, The Big Short feels like a dark mirror to Martin Scorsese's 2013 drama The Wolf Of Wall Street , another jazzy, energetic film about clever financial fraud leading to big profits at the expense of small investors. Both films share that reckless glee at turning a complicated story into a thrill-ride fantasy about beating the market and reaping insane rewards through clever insight. But whereas Wolf only paid lip service to the ramifications of its protagonist's illegal and immoral behavior, before reveling in the power fantasy of that behavior, Short keeps its disapproval clear and present at all times — especially toward the end, as Baum shifts from being an exploratory audience avatar to reminding viewers that they paid the cost of everything they're seeing onscreen. It's all the fun of Wolf without the sticky feeling of compromise afterward; it has an authentic conscience and a belief in its characters' intentions.

The performances in Big Short are unashamedly broad. Gosling's sneering affect as the voice of the film is deliberately off-putting, reminding viewers that even though he's their guide, he isn't on their side. Carell is the closest thing the film has to a hero; Baum is there to profit off the criminality he sees around him, but he at least has the humanity to be sick about it. Carell has had a long run of characters filled with impotent, seething rage, and he throws himself into this one fully. Bale, a tremendously committed actor who's too distinctive to disappear into roles easily, is the biggest surprise, with his wheedling voice, unfocused expression, and gaping mouth. He's effectively disarming and repellent at the same time, like so much about this playful yet purposefully alarming film.

Jaap Buitendijk / Paramount Pictures

But the actors take second place to Hank Corwin's fast-paced editing, easily the film's single most valuable asset. It's about as obtrusive as film editing gets, but it gives the film a reckless, nervy energy to go with the characters' discomfiture as they investigate the swaggering real estate agents selling fraudulent mortgages, or the regulators letting the regulatees call the shots. Not all the film's gambits work out: Corwin repeatedly drops in quick flurries of stock footage of ordinary people and items, presumably to remind us all that there's still a world outside of Wall Street, and that the vast numbers tossed around by these suits and scruffy prognosticators mean something to real, relatable people. The tactic is more distraction and visual noise than meaningful theme.

And a repeated tactic in McKay and Charles Randolph's script, which has characters turning to the camera to debunk the onscreen version of events, is amusing enough. But it's also baffling. When Vennett lies about the origin of his brilliant Chinese analyst during a meeting, and the analyst reveals the lies in an audience aside, it's a smart moment that uncovers something about Vennett's motormouthed character. But when the young investors stop a particularly theatrical scene to explain that reality was nothing like what we're seeing onscreen, and then go back to the theatrical version, it feels like McKay doesn't know whether he wants to prioritize authenticity or entertainment. Yes, he's establishing a trust level by revealing the inescapable synthetic nature of the screen. But by continuing the little ruse after undermining it, he makes any pretense of honesty seem hypocritical.

Like Wolf Of Wall Street , or the banking industry in general, The Big Short can't entirely be trusted to tell the truth, or to have the audience's best interests at heart. It's a slick three-ring circus of a film, a showy, flashy experience that has to constantly balance its nervy, excitable aesthetics with the much duller and more depressing truth. Inevitably, it reduces its victims to numbers. But like that sly science teacher who's always ready to bust out the showy chemical reactions, McKay has an actual interest in teaching, and a good chance of sneaking some education in among the explosions.

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The Big Short — film review: ‘Barbed, often brilliant’

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Nigel Andrews

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As an FT film critic I’d be writing at greater length about The Big Short if the film hadn’t already been taken to its heart by the pink paper. I repeat in the UK what a colleague pronounced from the US opening . This is a barbed, often brilliant comedy drama, directed and co-scripted (with Charles Randolph) by Adam Anchorman McKay from Michael Lewis’s same-name book about the build-up to the banking crisis.

Lewis’s “heroes just for one day” — to give them a Bowie benediction — were the rebel brokers who bet against the banks in the prelude to 2008. They detected the death bug in Wall Street’s culture of derivatives, CDOs and institutionalised fraudulence. A film on this subject could still have gone wrong, even with actors such as Christian Bale (superb), Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell and Brad Pitt. It does go wrong, a little, with Pitt. When you’re an actor/producer/demigod you just have to give yourself the first pious speech out of the film’s trap.

Later the pious speeches start multiplying. But audiences should disregard deathbed contritions. Before it gets saintly The Big Short is a big, clever chortle, full of sardonic insights into a time of woe. And with these characters they’re insider insights.

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The Big Short Review

14 Jan 2016

The Big Short

How do you make the financial crisis compelling? The challenge has largely defeated filmmakers. They’ve tried the personal tragedy ( 99 Homes ), the documentary ( Inside Job ) and the ultra-serious recreation ( Margin Call ) — and while all had their strengths, they barely touched audiences not already interested in the disaster. But Adam McKay may have a better approach, by emphasising not just the criminality of the system but also its absurdity.

From the off, McKay bends over backwards to make this digestible. Ryan Gosling’s breezy, arch narration casually ignores the fourth wall, and the cast is packed with charismatic superstars. Christian Bale is Michael Burry MD, the antisocial hedge fund manager who first sees the rot at the heart of the mortgage derivatives market. Soon Steve Carell’s furious Mark Baum and his team take interest, partnering up with Gosling’s wheeler-dealing Jared Vennett. They’re followed by novice investors Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) and Charlie Geller (John Magaro) — who are in turn guided by Brad Pitt’s eccentric Ben Rickert. The film swings fluidly between these three main groups, never pausing enough to drag.

This is the best film yet to tackle the biggest financial disaster since 1929.

To dissect the more technical aspects of the crash, McKay cuts to silly little skits with yet more big names. Margot Robbie, in a bubble bath, explains derivatives, while Anthony Bourdain cooks up a storm that parallels the bankers cooking the books. It still can’t make everything simple — these financial models were designed to be impenetrable — but the tongue-in-cheek approach offers a strong beginner’s guide. McKay also never loses sight of the fact that financiers are socially maladroit nerds who only think they’re masters of the universe, “like someone burst a piñata full of white guys who are bad at golf”, as one character puts it.

There’s an obvious limitation in the fact that the film’s protagonists are part of the system; even as they see the crash coming, their aim is to cash in rather than prevent it. But compared to the reckless, grasping men who wrecked all our finances, they seem paragons of honour and probity — especially when their brilliant schemes become weights around their necks as the system stumbles on.

Though occasionally scrappy and arguably over-long, this is the best film yet to tackle the biggest financial disaster since 1929. It informs and outrages us without resorting to Michael Moore-style haranguing, and if it can just find a mass audience, could finally inspire some change.

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The big short, common sense media reviewers.

Finance dramedy turns complex ideas into gripping cinema.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Mixed messages; the characters profit hugely as th

Although they bet against the housing market and r

Heated exchanges between people who are losing lot

A few scenes that take place in strip clubs featur

Frequent swearing throughout, mainly "f--k,&q

Many well-established financial companies are ment

Several scenes are set in bars, restaurants, and n

Positive Messages

Mixed messages; the characters profit hugely as the economy crumbles, but their story also shows how It's tough to be the first person to realize something important, because everyone else will be convinced you're mistaken or crazy. It's also hard to stand by your position in the face of consistent opposition; it's all too easy to start to doubt yourself.

Positive Role Models

Although they bet against the housing market and reap huge gains as the economy crumbles, the main characters are portrayed as smart enough to realize that something is dangerously amiss in the global financial system, confident enough to place huge bets on their idea, and tough enough to defend a position that was initially losing money, with everyone telling them they're fools.

Violence & Scariness

Heated exchanges between people who are losing lots of money. References to personal loss, including via suicide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A few scenes that take place in strip clubs feature topless/half-dressed women.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Frequent swearing throughout, mainly "f--k," "a--hole," and "s--t."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Many well-established financial companies are mentioned, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Countrywide, Bank of America, JPMorgan, and more, with a special focus on Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Mac and Dell computers, BlackBerry and Nokia mobile devices, Bloomberg terminals. Discussion of the high-end restaurant Nobu. Caesar's Palace.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Several scenes are set in bars, restaurants, and nightclubs where people are drinking. Some sequences show people celebrating big financial deals with liquor.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Big Short is based on the bestselling book by Michael Lewis. It follows the story of several investors (played by Christian Bale , Steve Carell , Ryan Gosling , and Brad Pitt ) who were among the first to spot warning signs in the real estate market that triggered the global financial meltdown of 2008. By betting against the housing market, they managed to reap huge gains as the economy crumbled, leaving millions out of work and homeless -- which might make some viewers feel pretty conflicted about rooting for them. There's some raucous drinking, plenty of strong language (mainly "f--k" and "s--t"), and glimpses of topless strippers/exotic dancers in this finance-themed dramedy, which is best suited for adults and older teens. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

Parents say (7)
Kids say (17)

Based on 7 parent reviews

Very important film for all adults

I don’t get bothered by consumerism but if you do and it really ticks you off, i would recommend not seeing this movie if you get bothered by it don’t get bothered by consumerism, i just put too much consumerism so if you do then to know that sort of thing before you watch it, there’s a lot of educational value in this as it follows 3 men who profited from the real estate market collapse and they were the first to predict it and how the big banks at this time tried to cover it up and acted fraudulent and it takes a closer in-depth look into this and great messages about that there’s always opportunities for those willing to look for them, although kids probably won’t be interested in it i was but i am not like most kids, as for sex there’s a 2 scenes that take place in strip clubs that feature topless half naked women but no graphic on screen sex it did have a lot of swearing more than expected when i watched it mostly f**k, s**t, a*****e with 74 uses of f**k, 50 uses of s**t, 7 uses of a*s, what's the story.

The years leading up to the global financial meltdown of 2008 were filled with financial exuberance, as Wall Street firms made billions trading bonds made up of residential mortgages. A handful of investors smelled something amiss, eventually realizing it was all a house of cards that would inevitably crumble. Their bets against these bonds, THE BIG SHORT, eventually paid off hugely -- but only when the entire U.S. economy fell apart, leaving millions homeless and unemployed. Christian Bale , Steve Carell , Ryan Gosling , and Brad Pitt star as the skeptical investors, all based on real people who were featured in Michael Lewis' best-selling book of the same name.

Is It Any Good?

The Big Short is a flashy, quick-witted, and, yes, entertaining film about the housing and banking collapse. But it might just be a little too entertaining, a little too funny for a film that's so sobering. You laugh at all the asides -- and they are funny, though perhaps not all of them were necessary -- and then feel terrible for laughing. (Though we really did enjoy the celebrity-cameo-filled footnotes that explained the dizzying banking and investment maneuvers and products that basically undid the economy.)

Then again, nervous laughter may just be an appropriate response to a movie about how a small group of outsiders identified a weakness in a system high on arrogance and avarice -- a system that, unfortunately, had such weight that, when it toppled, it took so many innocent and not-so-innocent souls with it. Ultimately, The Big Short is whip smart, supported by a script that manages to educate while it amuses. And then there's the powerhouse cast, led by a brilliant Bale as a doctor-turned-hedge-fund-manager who has an ease with numbers and an unease with people.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about greed. Why were so many banks and bankers so eager to keep selling the mortgage bonds that they must have suspected were flawed? Did the huge profits make everything seem acceptable?

How does the film explain very complex financial concepts? Did you learn anything new about Wall Street? Do you think this was an effective way to give viewers a sense of what was happening?

How does this based-on-a-true-story film compare to other movies set in the financial world, including the ones that are all fiction ( Wall Street ) and others that are also based on real events ( The Wolf of Wall Street )? How accurate do you think The Big Short is to what actually happened? Why might filmmakers change some facts?

How is drinking portrayed? Is it glamorized? Do characters face any consequences?

Movie Details

In theaters : December 11, 2015
On DVD or streaming : March 15, 2016
Cast : Brad Pitt , Christian Bale , Ryan Gosling , Steve Carell
Director : Adam McKay
Studio : Paramount Pictures
Genre : Drama
Topics : History
Run time : 130 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : pervasive language and some sexuality/nudity
Award : Academy Award
Last updated : July 15, 2024

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The Big Short

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

It sounds like a horror show: a doomsday epic about the 2008 financial crisis and the Wall Street wolves who got rich off it. Gone were the homes, jobs and savings of average Joes. But wait. As directed and written by Adam McKay – the dude behind Anchorman and other giddy hits with Will Ferrell, his partner on the website Funny or Die – The Big Short is hunting bigger game. I’d call it a Restoration comedy for right the fuck now, a farce fueled by rage against the machine that relentlessly kills ethics, and a hell of a hilarious time at the movies if you’re up for laughs that stick in your throat.

Based on the nonfiction bestseller by Michael Lewis, The Big Short is brilliantly constructed by McKay to hit where it hurts. A terrific Christian Bale pulls you right in as Michael Burry, an eccentric neurologist-turned-money-manager who pads around barefoot in his San Jose office, fiddling with his glass eye and banging drums. It’s Burry who figures out that those subprime home loans the banks hand out to bad credit risks are a disaster in the making.

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Wall Street fat cats dismiss Burry as a crank. But not Jared Vennett ( Ryan Gosling ), a Deutsche Bank dealmaker who relishes Burry’s idea to bet against the banks by shorting home loans that are bound to default. Gosling, a virtuoso of verbal sleaze, talks directly to the camera, and he’s volcanically fierce and funny. It’s Vennett who intensifies the big short by partnering with Mark Baum ( Steve Carell ), a hedge-fund manager who runs FrontPoint, a subsidiary of Morgan Stanley. Baum is a hardass. But he knows a good deal when it gets a thumbs-up from his trio of number crunchers (Rafe Spall, Hamish Linklater and Jeremy Strong). Baum is also the only character in the film with a working conscience. Carell is just tremendous, following his Oscar-nominated turn in Foxcatcher with a performance of comic cunning and shocking gravity. Likewise, Brad Pitt finds the disgust in Ben Rickert, a banker who’s paying for his sins by helping the environment – that is, until he uses two young money managers (Finn Wittrock and John Magaro) to bite the hand that fed him.

Camera maestro Barry Ackroyd helps McKay keep the plot in a perpetual spin. When it sails over your head – and it will – McKay drops in celeb explainers, including Selena Gomez, Anthony Bourdain and Margot Robbie. Are you more likely to understand CDOs if a naked Robbie explains them in a bubble bath? Probably not. But who’s complaining? McKay dares greatly by couching his anger in a slapstick tragedy that makes us wish we could see every character in it behind bars. Does the risk pay off? Bet on it.

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The Big Short turns the financial collapse into an angry, funny, sad underdog story

It’s not perfect, but it’s still essential viewing.

by Emily St. James

Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling face off in The Big Short.

By far the most interesting thing about The Big Short is how it gets you to root for catastrophe.

Based on the Michael Lewis book of the same name , the film — which is set between 2005 and 2008 and tells the story of men who saw the financial collapse coming and bet big on it — is by no means perfect. It sometimes feels like an audiovisual assault, pummeling you with information until you cry uncle. But in some ways, that’s the point: Here’s all the stuff that prevented you from noticing the world was about to fall apart. (We’ll have more to say about The Big Short when it opens wide on December 23. It opens in New York and Los Angeles on December 11.)

Director Adam McKay comes from the world of comedy; he’s probably most famous for the Anchorman films . So as you’d expect, the movie is filled with great, hilarious moments and scenes where characters joke around or even dig into the absurdity of their situation. But he also understands how closely twinned humor can be with anger, and as the film goes on — and the apocalypse lurches closer — it gradually drains of anything that might be called leavening.

That’s a clue as to what makes The Big Short so good: It’s filled with contradictions that make it a stronger film. McKay and co-writer Charles Randolph embrace the idea that this movie is going to horrify a lot of people. But in the midst of that reaction, they might also get you to think about how and why Americans value what they value — and what can happen when we don’t check those impulses.

Here are the five contradictions at the heart of The Big Short .

1) This is a feel-good, underdog story about the end of the world

The men The Big Short celebrates didn’t cause the financial crisis. Instead, they had the foresight to know it was coming and bet big on it happening — which meant they ultimately made substantial amounts of money.

These men are played by such Hollywood luminaries as Christian Bale , Steve Carell , Ryan Gosling , and Brad Pitt , the sorts of actors we’re used to rooting for in other films. And indeed, McKay and Randolph structure their screenplay like a traditional underdog story, where the guys nobody believes in come from behind to win the big game. Except in this case, “winning the big game” means that our “heroes” were right, and the world really is about to experience a gigantic financial collapse.

This aspect of the film has earned plenty of criticism. Is The Big Short asking you to cheer for monsters? When I watched it, I experienced a disquieting feeling right around the middle of the movie: I was excited for something to happen that would ruin the lives of millions (including past me), simply because McKay and Randolph had so skillfully aped something like Rocky .

But I think this is key to what makes The Big Short work. For one thing, it doesn’t focus on the architects of the crisis. Instead, it uses those who saw it coming to argue that many of the people who caused the crisis didn’t even realize what they were doing. That’s an inherent imbalance in the system, and it makes sense to want to see it undone.

What’s more, the “underdog” setup is central to the film’s most core idea. The narratives we most often sell to ourselves as Americans — including ideas like capitalism is always a great thing and should be allowed to run pretty much unchecked, or gutsy underdogs are the best kinds of heroes — are narratives we need to examine more closely. Sometimes the underdog is betting on something that will destroy lives.

2) The Big Short is about finance, but it’s shot like a Bourne film

At its best, The Big Short feels a little like a lost script by the great screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky (who penned Network , among many others), filmed in the style of The Bourne Identity . It’s about something we think of as “boring,” but it aims to code that boring story with the most exciting filmmaking techniques imaginable.

The Big Short feels a little like a lost script by the great Paddy Chayefsky, filmed in the style of The Bourne Identity

McKay utilizes lots of quick, gritty close-ups, and his camera often feels unsteady, especially in the film’s second half, as the men at the center of the story come to believe the system has been rigged against them — and the people of the world.

Hank Corwin ’s editing sometimes feels more like free association than strict point-A-to-point-B storytelling. He’ll drop in a montage of weird pop culture moments from 2006 to remind you of what was keeping us distracted at the time, or he and McKay will toss in a quick sidebar meant to help us better understand a complicated financial concept. Characters speak directly to the camera. Famous people pause the action to explain the poisonous concepts that created the crisis. The Big Short never wants you to be bored — because its message is so urgent.

3) This is a riotous comedy, shot through with anger, that eventually gets really sad

Comedy and anger taste great together. Lewis Black could tell you that, and they’re paired up at the center of many of the greatest satires. But the angry comedy has a bit of a bad reputation, because it’s so, so easy for things to go wrong, and for a film to become a righteous screed that doesn’t know how to stop hectoring the audience.

It's a single, still moment of serene dread amid the chaos

To be sure, it sometimes feels as if McKay and Randolph are poised to tip over into the film equivalent of that guy who rants on Facebook about the horrors of life itself. In the early going, the film is frequently, incredibly funny, especially when focused on Carell’s character, Mark — the closest thing it has to a conscience — and his team of financial outcasts and oddballs, who boast the energy of one of McKay’s other bro comedy ensembles. But as it reaches its midpoint, the characters have grown so strident about what they know must be coming that it can feel a little exhausting.

Fortunately, The Big Short rights itself. Eventually, its humor and anger fade, replaced by frustration, confusion, and sadness. The most memorable shot that McKay and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd cook up comes very late in the film, when Mark realizes how much money he’s made from something that has trampled so many lives. The camera pulls back to a wide view of behemoth Manhattan skyscrapers looming over him; it’s a single, still moment of serene dread amid the chaos that’s meant to make you a little nauseated.

4) There’s lots of tension, even as you know what’s coming

The Big Short acknowledges early and often that the financial system is about to fall to ruin. It knows you know this. It doesn’t try to hide the inevitable or wring false tension from it.

What’s impressive, then, is how much tension the film does find in this scenario, mostly from the characters it’s centered on. Bale, for instance, plays a man named Michael Burry, a hedge fund manager who was one of the earliest to realize what was about to happen to the housing market — and, subsequently, the entire financial system. As Michael bets more and more of his investors’ money on his seemingly quixotic quest, you actually find yourself queasily wondering if everything will fall apart in time to redeem him in the eyes of those who’ve given him money.

Pitt’s character, a disillusioned former Wall Street guy named Ben Rickert, wrings similar tension out of the situation, because he’s not only fairly positive that the system’s going to collapse — he’s pretty sure it’s unsustainable in the long term. Of course, we now know he was right about the former; so far, he hasn’t been right about the latter. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t be.

5) This is a left-leaning movie about right-leaning heroes

The Wall Street finance genius is the closest thing American fiction has to a truly conservative hero. These types tend to succeed via their own ingenuity and wits, and if anybody’s trying to stop them, it’s usually the government or some regulatory agency contained therein. They earn extra points if everybody thinks they’re wrong for a while before realizing just how right they are.

The film's ultimate villain is the combination of incompetence and stupidity

Yet The Big Short — which celebrates figures exactly like those described above — leans way, way left. It doesn’t argue for the complete and total abandonment of capitalism, but you get the sense that if it had run for another half-hour, it just might have. It wants to recognize the guys who got it right, while also understanding they’re part of a system that, as a whole, got it very, very wrong — and it’s frustrated and angry about how little has been done to fix that system and all of the lives destroyed by it.

Still, the film should be easily enjoyed by those of all political stripes. Its ultimate villain isn’t “the government” or “the evil bankers.” No, its ultimate villain is the combination of incompetence and stupidity; it’s anybody who thinks things can’t change or get worse because it’s convenient to believe as much. And as the movie makes clear, people like that can thrive in any system imaginable, public or private.

The Big Short is, ultimately, an argument that sometimes it’s worth listening to the pessimists and prophets of doom, particularly if they can tell you a joke as they’re predicting the apocalypse.

The Big Short is playing in New York and Los Angeles. It will be everywhere December 23.

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The Big Short Turns the Financial Meltdown Into a Heist Comedy

How do you make an exuberant comedy about the financial apocalypse of 2008 that also manages to elucidate — with documentary-like rigor — the labyrinthine fraud at the heart of the U.S. economy? It’s a challenge that the director Adam McKay leaps to in The Big Short ( see our story here ), which he adapted (with Charles Randolph) from Michael Lewis ’s book on the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market. It’s a rollicking bad time!

McKay invents his own glorious goofball syntax: part business thriller, part stand-up comedy, with a liberal dash of NPR didacticism — as in the Peabody-winning “This American Life” episode “The Giant Pool of Money.” He has a master of ceremonies in Ryan Gosling ’s Deutsche Bank slickster Jared Vennett (based on Lewis’s portrait of Greg Lippmann), who buttonholes the camera, explains how bankers went from “losers” to hotshots, and introduces characters like the misfit San Jose money manager Michael Burry ( Christian Bale ) and voluble New York hedge-fund manager Mark Baum ( Steve Carell ), both of whom bet against a booming housing market built on bad loans. Vennett stops the show for “explainer” sidebars that are the movie’s glory: celebrities who spell out what’s meant by such concepts as “mortgage-backed securities,” “collateralized-debt obligations” (CDOs), and “extrapolation bias.” It’s important to follow along: The more you can cram into your mind, the more your mind will be blown by the titanic scope of the greed and illogic.

The film’s various heroes ignore conventional wisdom and risk everything for what they believe, and we root for them: We love to identify with mavericks, even (maybe especially) if in real life we follow the herd. But in this case there’s a brilliant, nasty paradox at work. When we root for each man to be proved right and make a killing on cascading defaults, we’re actually rooting for global economic collapse and the loss of our own money. We go, Yes! They did it!!! They’re rich!!! And then: Oh. Shit. It’s both a great narrative strategy — Why would we want to identify with us, the patsies? — and a window like no other into How Things Work in the infernal machine that is 21st-century capitalism.

To be fair, these men didn’t create said infernal machine; they only recognized and profited from it. Bale’s Burry (the only real name among the film’s protagonists) is a socially awkward (on the Aspergian end of the spectrum) ex-neurologist who bops around his office-playroom waving a pair of drumsticks. He’s the one who gets it first, who flies to New York to buy “shorts” from bankers who shoot stunned glances at one another while thinking, Sure, we’ll take your hundred million, heh-heh. Easy money! Bale plays him sweet and earnest, in his own world of impersonal projections, incapable of lying but seemingly untroubled by the morality of his investment: He’s only fazed when the market doesn’t collapse at the precise instant he knows it should, when it continues to be propped up by delusional thinking and he has to hold out against bosses who think he’s destroying their firm. Will things go to hell in time to save his investment? Fingers crossed!

It’s Carell’s Baum (based on Steve Eisman) who’s divided against himself, in it to win it but aghast at the chicanery and shortsightedness and the prospect of economic Armageddon. He still — as Vennett notes, with sadness and derision — has faith in the system. Baum’s brother (also in finance) jumped off a skyscraper, and he can’t shrug off the real-world consequences of what he does. Before making a deal with Vennett, Baum leads his team to Florida, where for sale signs and idle bulldozers dot suburban neighborhoods with their empty McMansions. What shocks him even more is the joshing, nihilistic materialism of the young men who collect fat commissions on loans that they know will never be paid back. “They’re not confessing,” says one of Baum’s assistants. “They’re bragging.” Even more appalling is the sequence in which Baum and Vennett travel to Vegas to get a close-up look at the industry packaging the loans. A scene in which Baum quizzes a smug CDO manager (clearly based on Wing Chau, whose libel suit against Lewis was dismissed) ends with one of the few applause lines. Baum hisses: “Short everything this guy has touched!”

Carell’s Baum is capable of sitting still and focusing for short amounts of time but not of keeping his thoughts to himself. He always looks as if he is itchy in his skin and smelling bad things. It’s a wonderful performance—peerlessly antsy. But the whole cast is terrific. Gosling sends up his own ingenuous good looks, and he has a funny, mocking rapport with Jeremy Strong, who radiates hostility as one of Baum’s partners. Finn Wittrock and John Magaro are the film’s other protagonists, a pair of fledgling Colorado investors who get wind of the potential windfall and turn for advice to their old mentor, Ben Rickert — Brad Pitt with a beard in his intellectual, Robert Redford–esque persona. Pitt (who also brought Lewis’s Moneyball to the screen) co-produced The Big Short with Dede Gardner, and, as in 12 Years a Slave, he gets to be the voice of decency, reminding his protégés that their fortunes will be made from the loss of investments, pensions, and houses. He scolds them for dancing.

Although McKay is best known for the slapstick Will Ferrell comedies Anchorman and Stepbrothers, he has also shown a fair amount of political sass. He directed Ferrell in the barbed Broadway hit You’re Welcome, America: A Final Night With George W. Bush, and he closed the 2010 Ferrell–Mark Wahlberg buddy-cop comedy The Other Guys with a chart of bonuses paid to executives at financial companies taking government bailouts. Reviewing that film, I wrote, “Maybe instead of another buddy-cop movie they ought to have made a comedy about an SEC dummy.” This is close! Dr. Who vet Karen Gillan flexes her mile-long gams as the blithely unconscientious Securities and Exchange Commission agent with a yen for finance types — not a subtle character. More fascinatingly weird is Melissa Leo as the blinkered little Standard & Poor’s analyst who’s taken aback when Baum calls her out for giving triple-A ratings to triple-Z loans. “If we don’t give [the banks] what they want,” she explains, “they will go to Moody’s.”

The Big Short ends with some pointed editorializing about the lack of consequences for the fraudsters who cost the country trillions, and I was going to complain about the movie turning preachy … until I remembered having dinner in 2009 or thereabouts with some far-right-wing friends of my parents. The problem, they explained, was that the government had forced banks to give loans to minorities and immigrants. The problem was too much regulation. These are not the sort of people who’d see the director Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job or any pinko documentary. But maybe they’ll see this nutty, whooshy comedy (the best film of the year? Possibly …) and choke on their popcorn. McKay’s way of spinning this story gets us where we live.

*This article appears in the November 30, 2015 issue of New York Magazine .

movie review
the big short
michael lewis
new york magazine

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The Big Short

As Ryan Gosling ’s character lays out bluntly in the early scenes of director Adam McKay ’s The Big Short , normal people aren’t really meant to fully understand the financial world. The industry is filled with all kinds of strategies and programs with names that sound like they were pulled out of a hat, and the idea is to confuse you so that you’ll just leave all of your business in the hands of an advisor – who may or may not just use your money to get themselves rich and be happy to leave you in the poor house. One could argue that it’s this particular aspect of the system that The Big Short aims to entirely upend and destroy, and the film does just that – presenting an engaging true story that’s brought to life with fantastic performances and is as entertaining as it is educational about the economic crisis that hit the country like a bus seven years ago.

Based on the book of the same name by Michael Lewis – whose source material brought us the awesome Moneyball a few years ago – the film is built around an ensemble of characters who never actually interact, but are all connected through the fact that they saw the collapse of the housing market coming before anyone else did. This is a group of weirdos and bizarre individuals, including the socially inept Dr. Michael Burry ( Christian Bale ), the rage-fueled Mark Baum ( Steve Carell ), the egotistical Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) and the young, inexperienced duo of Jamie Shipley and Charlie Geller (Finn Wittrock, John Magaro). Each of them discovers the terrible truth behind the housing market from a different angle – learning that the entire system is being propped up on bad loans that are all but guaranteed to fail – and over the course of several years, all essentially invest in the explosion of a ticking time bomb.

There is obviously an overly-dramatic version of this movie that could have been made, but the greatest asset of The Big Short is the blended tone approach provided by Adam McKay, who also co-wrote the script with Charles Randolph. The filmmaker takes what could be dry-as-toast material about Collateralized Debt Obligations and smartly applies his impressive comedic acumen to get it all across in an entertaining way. Long before it even has a chance of losing the audience, Short grabs them with some impressive fourth-wall breaking that gives the characters opportunities to explain themselves. Perhaps the best moments, however, come when the film breaks away from the narrative altogether, cutting away to Margot Robbie in a bathtub explaining sub-prime mortgages, or Anthony Bourdain comparing CDOs to some nasty seafood stew. It should be noted that learning all of this awful information about the financial system will very likely boil your blood and leave you incensed that nobody saw the collapse coming, but you’ll at least be laughing and smiling before the darker realizations hit.

Equally deserving of praise is also just how non-biased The Big Short manages to be – not pointing fingers at specific people or parties, but instead making you think about the entire governmental system that allowed banks to operate with minimal regulation and let the housing bubble build over the course of multiple decades. There’s a particular level of trust in moviegoers that McKay demonstrates with the film, as he really just does his job to present the facts as true events and follow the stories of the men who saw it all coming. It’s really left to you as a viewer to decide how you feel about all of it – though obviously the bet on the movie’s behalf is that it’s all going to seriously piss you off, and possibly convince you to pay more attention to what’s going on in that arena.

The nature of the narrative isn’t without its pitfalls – specifically that everyone in the audience already knows what happed in 2008, and by extension what happens to all of the main players. But what really keeps you engaged are the fantastic performances from everyone in the ensemble. Though he’s almost entirely isolated in his corner of the story, Christian Bale is fantastic as the oddball Burry and provides The Big Short with some of its best moments as he does extreme levels of research and fights against those in his company who think he’s insane for betting against the housing market. Brad Pitt is also wonderful in what is a more-limited role, playing a former insider turned outsider who gets reluctantly pulled back into the financial world after the soon-to-burst bubble is brought to his attention.

Really, though, it’s Steve Carell’s turn that anchors it all. Mark Baum is not only a good character representation of all the anger that the film generates about the fucked up banking world, but also is the one who makes you realize that the protagonists of the story are not heroes. They’re people who saw a broken system, and ultimately profited from its complete failure (and by proxy the financial ruin of thousands of people). It’s tricky water to navigate, but Carell really pulls it off with an emotional and complex performance.

It’s hard not to be impressed by The Big Short . It tackles complex subject matters with a proportionately complex narrative structure, but with creativity and smart sensibilities that come together as an equally thought-provoking and amusing film. It’s an impressive piece of serious work from the director of Anchorman , and if this is what he can add to the world of prestige films, then I want to see more.

Eric Eisenberg is the Assistant Managing Editor at CinemaBlend. After graduating Boston University and earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism, he took a part-time job as a staff writer for CinemaBlend, and after six months was offered the opportunity to move to Los Angeles and take on a newly created West Coast Editor position. Over a decade later, he's continuing to advance his interests and expertise. In addition to conducting filmmaker interviews and contributing to the news and feature content of the site, Eric also oversees the Movie Reviews section, writes the the weekend box office report (published Sundays), and is the site's resident Stephen King expert. He has two King-related columns.

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Wall Street is not going to like the 'Big Short' movie

"The Big Short" debuted at the Ziegfeld Theater in Midtown Manhattan on Monday evening, and Wall Street is not going to like it.

It's not because the movie makes Goldman Sachs bankers look super obnoxious, or that the whole narrative of the film is, "Blame the banks!"

Wall Street won't like it because ultimately the movie is a poorly executed explainer of the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

I had high expectations going in that the film would be one of my favorite Wall Street-themed movies to date, given that it's based on Michael Lewis' best-selling book by the same title, one of the best books about the crisis.

The trailer is awesome. The cast is made up of some of the best actors in Hollywood, including Academy Award winner Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, and Brad Pitt . And the acting is stellar.

"The Big Short" is a remarkable, mostly true story that chronicles a group of Wall Street outsiders who saw what no one else saw coming — the housing crash. This group made millions betting against subprime housing by buying up credit-default swaps on mortgage bonds.

But what ruined the experience for me was when the movie would cut to bizarre, comedic monologues in which a random celebrity would attempt to explain a piece of financial jargon.

One featured "Wolf of Wall Street" star Margot Robbie in a bubble bath explaining what it means to "short" something.

Another featured celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain cutting up three-day-old fish for a seafood stew while explaining how banks repackaged crappy mortgages into bonds. Even pop singer and actress Selena Gomez made an appearance — alongside economist Richard Thaler — going over how a collateralized debt obligation works while playing blackjack in Las Vegas.

Of course, reading about credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations is difficult enough, and even Lewis seemed surprised that someone wanted to make a movie about the book.

"One problem I distinctly did NOT worry about when I wrote The Big Short was how to write it so that it would become a movie. Who'd make a movie about credit-default swaps? Who for that matter would make a movie of any book of mine?" Lewis recently wrote in Vanity Fair .

But these scenes took away from the story, and while you need to find a fun way to explain something that seems incredibly complicated to the masses, this tactic missed the mark for me.

It was still a great night, and except for Bale, all the stars were there.

We've included some photo highlights of the evening below.

From left, actor Finn Wittrock, author Michael Lewis, actors Jeremy Strong and Steve Carell, director Adam McKay, actor Ryan Gosling, chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures Brad Grey, and actors Brad Pitt and John Magaro.

Carell played FrontPoint Partners hedge fund manager Mark Baum, a character based on the real-life Steve Eisman.

Gosling played Deutsche Bank trader Jared Vennett, based on the real-life Greg Lippmann.

Pitt played ex-banker Ben Rickert, based on real-life Ben Hockett.

Wittrock played Jamie Shipley of Brownfield Capital, a "garage band hedge fund." His character is based on the real-life Jamie Mai of Cornwall Capital.

Magaro played Brownfield Capital's Charlie Geller, based on the real-life Charlie Ledley of Cornwall Capital.

Byron Mann played CDO fund manager Mr. Chau, based on the real-life Wing Chau.

McKay with Lewis and Pitt.

There were bona fide Wall Streeters at the premiere too. Here is Vincent "Vinny" Daniel, one of Eisman's traders at FrontPoint Partners.

And here is Dr. Michael Burry, the founder of Scion Capital.

Here's the new trailer:

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DVD & Streaming

The Big Short

Content caution.

In Theaters

December 11, 2015
Christian Bale as Michael Burry; Steve Carell as Mark Baum; Ryan Gosling as Jared Vennett; John Magaro as Charlie Geller; Finn Wittrock as Jamie Shipley; Brad Pitt as Ben Rickert; Hamish Linklater as Porter Collins; Jeremy Strong as Vinnie Daniel; Rafe Spall as Danny Moses; Marisa Tomei as Cynthia Baum

Home Release Date

March 15, 2016

Distributor

Movie review.

The Bible tells us to never build a house on sand: It’s a good way to lose your house.

The Bible doesn’t say anything explicitly about building your house on a bubble, but the same principle would seem to apply. Bubbles just aren’t ideal foundations for stable housing—much less an entire economy built on the back of that housing. But according to The Big Short, a big bubble was in fact the foundation of the United States’ economy for years.

Until the whole thing went pop!

It didn’t start out that way, of course. The element that set the whole bubble rolling—bonds constructed of massive collections of stable, 30-year mortgages—was initially a rock-solid idea. People tend to pay their mortgages, right? So creating an investment that (for lack of a better word) bets people will pay them is like, well, money in the bank.

And the system worked great for a while … until home prices began rising faster than the incomes of the people who bought them. Until banks started letting folks who couldn’t afford a home get a loan for one anyway. Until ratings agencies started automatically stamping all those housing bonds with AAA ratings, even if the bond’s mortgages were more like, um, ZZZ. Until subprime mortgages became all the rage, giving homeowners the ability to pay a little at first … in exchange for a lot later.

By the mid-2000s, everything looked just fine. Home prices continued to rise, and more people owned one than ever before. Nobody was actually looking inside these bonds to see whether they were as solid as supposed. I mean, why spend all your due-diligence time doing that? People pay their mortgages, right?

But then one day, financial wunderkind Michael Burry decided to get under the skin of those little bonds. And what he saw there was … nothing. Nothing solid, anyway—nothing on which the world’s biggest economy should be built on. The promises the bonds made were empty. Just like the thin air that’s in the middle of a bubble.

Michael saw the disaster coming. He knew that the U.S. housing market—nay, the whole global economy—was a couple of years away from spectacularly imploding. Institutions would collapse. People would lose jobs by the millions. It could shake the world in ways not seen since 1929.

And in that moment, Michael knows exactly what he must do: Bet against the world economy. Because sometimes the best time to make a buck is when no one else has a buck to spend.

Positive Elements

Michael and the other subprime characters in The Big Short buy and create, essentially, insurance policies against the mortgage bonds—betting that the bonds will fall “short.” Most invest because that’s what investors do. They’re just looking for ways to make money in the midst of a bad situation. But at least one—Mark Baum—wants to somehow teach the banks, investment houses and the government itself a lesson.

You won’t find a rooting interest beyond that in The Big Short. (And even that one is dubious, partly because it’s exceedingly mysterious as to how it’ll all work, and also given the fact that Mark acts like a big ol’ jerk most of the time.) The financial institutions on the verge of collapse are portrayed as either incredibly inept or downright fraudulent. The “heroes” we’re given are betting, essentially, on a doomsday scenario—a bit like investing in bombs in the hopes that a good-sized war’ll break out somewhere. No one is particularly likable here, much less laudable—and that just might be part of the point.

Spiritual Elements

Growing up, Mark excelled in his Talmudic training—but only because, a rabbi tells Mark’s mother, he’s using it to look for “inconsistencies in the Word of God.” (“Has he found any?” his mother asks.)

Sexual Content

As Mark investigates whether or not to bet against mortgage bonds, he goes on a fact-finding mission to a … strip club. (Turns out one real estate agent targets strippers for his special brand of home loans because they have difficulty getting traditional ones.) In a VIP room, while the mostly unclothed exotic dancer writhes in front of him (her breasts are basically bare), Mark asks about her real estate investments.

Bankers cavort in another strip club, and moviegoers see dancers prance around in thongs and pasties. Bikini-clad women frolic in a Las Vegas pool. One woman flirts with an investment banker, at least in part because she hopes to get a job with his firm. (It’s implied she sleeps with him.)

In one of the movie’s educational segments—which are celebrity-saturated asides explaining the bewildering lingo and complicated concepts integral to the plot—actress Margot Robbie explains mortgage bonds while taking a bubble bath.

Violent Content

Mark’s brother commits suicide by jumping off a ledge. (We see him right before he jumps.) “His face was so smashed,” Mark says. An alligator, swimming in a Florida pool, lunges at a couple of visitors.

Crude or Profane Language

Approaching 100 f-words. About 50 s-words. Also, quantities of “a–,” b–ch,” “h—,” “p—” and “pr–k.” God’s name is misused 10 or so times, thrice with “d–n.” Jesus’ name is abused a half-dozen times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

People smoke cigars or cigarettes. They drink wine, champagne, whiskey and mixed drinks. One investor, when he tries to warn his mother about the impending economic disaster, is told to up his dose of Zoloft and start taking Xanax.

Other Negative Elements

Mortgage investment brokers and other financial gurus gather in Las Vegas for a massive convention, and much of the dialogue takes place in casinos. Selena Gomez uses a blackjack hand to illustrate the concept of a Synthetic CDO. After learning just how dishonest the housing market is, Mark says he wants to find some “moral redemption at the roulette table.”

Someone discusses, in some detail, a deformity he has on his scrotum.

When two young investors, Jamie and Charlie, dance a little jig to celebrate their impending “shorts” windfall, their mentor, Ben, makes them stop. “You just bet against the American economy,” he tells them. If they get rich on this scheme (and they do), it means millions of innocent people will suffer (and they do).

It’s this dissonance that makes The Big Short difficult to watch and, perhaps, impossible to enjoy. When another investor brandishes a $47 million bonus check he received—a direct result of the bursting housing bubble—he turns to the camera and admits, “I never said I was the hero of the story.” He’s not. In this movie, you won’t find any heroes: only different levels of opportunism.

Based on the 2010 Michael Lewis book, The Big Short is an angry movie—and as preachy a film as you’ll see this side of God’s Not Dead. Everything we see—the tremendous acting, the celebrity asides, the heavy-handed symbolism (one employee at Standard & Poor’s who’s been rubber-stamping bonds as AAA-grade investments without much research, comes back from the optomitrist wearing disposable sunglasses and complaining that the dilation makes her nearly blind) is all in the service of a 130-minute sermon lambasting the banking and housing industries.

Which is not to say such organizations don’t deserve it. Certainly a great many things went wrong to spawn the Great Recession, and it seems some lessons should emerge in its wake.

Full disclosure: My working knowledge of high finance begins and ends with the occasional ATM withdrawal, so I’m hardly equipped to say what the movie gets right or wrong in terms of its financial recriminations. But my expertise as a movie reviewer and writer for Plugged In does prepare me to call it a pretty foul piece of work. If these financial wiz-kids dropped cash in a communal swear jar and invested the proceeds in their own get-rich-in-economic-catastrophe schemes, I’m pretty sure they’d double their money. And then there’s the stripper nudity and unrelenting societal pessimism to deal with, too.

For me, the movie’s name really says it all. Sure, it’s a big movie. An important movie, perhaps. But it left me feeling seriously shorted.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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10 Best Movies Like The Big Short You Need To See

Who actually made money from the crash in the big short (& how much), sylvester stallone announced his action retirement with this forgotten disaster movie… then broke the promise.

The Big Short provides a humorous and accessible way of understanding complex financial concepts related to the 2008 financial crisis.
The film's ending contrasts the success of its main characters with the impact of the crash on real people, serving as a warning for the future.
The epilogue of The Big Short warns that little has been learned from the 2008 crisis, as banks continue to sell high-risk investments similar to the infamous CDOs.

The Big Short does a great job of making complex financial topics accessible to viewers, but the movie’s ending still leaves a few aspects of its true story unexplained. Based on Michael Lewis’s 2010 book about the 2008 financial crisis, Adam McKay's film highlights how some key figures in the world of finance were able to profit from the housing market crash. Following an ensemble cast comprised of Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell, and Brad Pitt, The Big Short shows how the main characters predicted the crash, and how the fallout of their predictions came to fruition.

Going into The Big Short ’s ending, the U.S. economy is doomed as the 2008 financial crisis becomes inevitable. Though the film's real-life (and some loosely fictionalized) main characters are all able to profit from the crash due to their bets against the market, the victory is bittersweet as they realize the misery that befalls the real people who are affected. The Big Short ’s conclusion contrasts the success of its main characters, the underbelly of the broken economic system, and how the crash impacted U.S. citizens, all while providing a warning for the future.

There are plenty of great movies about finance and business that are just as entertaining and sharply satirical as Adam McKay's The Big Short.

"Bespoke Tranche Opportunity": The Big Short's Epilogue & Warning Explained

Will history repeat itself.

Ryan Gosling as Jared Vennett looking off to the side in The Big Short.

After depicting the collapse that led to the 2008 financial crisis, The Big Short includes an epilogue that covers the fates of the main characters while teasing another potential exploitation of the system like what investors did in 2007.

According to the epilogue, banks began selling billions in a new investment vehicle called “ bespoke tranche opportunities ” in 2015, which The Big Short claims are basically the same as the infamous CDOs . This detail is included as a warning that few, if any, lessons were learned from what happened in 2008, and that history could repeat itself again, this time with the bespoke tranche opportunities.

The Big Short’s Financial Concepts Explained

The complexity of the big short's terms require exploration.

Jamie (Finn Wittrock) and Charlie (John Magaro) dressed in suits walking outdoors in the city in The Big Short

The Big Short follows several key figures who were able to predict and profit off of a crash in the housing market. As such, there are several complex financial terms that are thrown around in the movie by its main characters, which are humorously explained by Margot Robbie and other celebrities the movie. Though incredibly complicated, these financial concepts are crucial to understanding the events that led up to the 2008 financial crisis, which finally sets in during The Big Short 's ending after over two hours of anticipation.

Mortgage Bonds

A mortgage bond is a kind of bond that represents a pool of mortgages bundled into one security , which is then sold to investors. These underlying bonds receive a rating from a credit rating agency based on how “creditworthy” they are, or how likely it is that they will pay back the money.

In the past, these mortgage bonds had been incredibly lucrative, but when banks began to run out of mortgages to put into the mortgage bonds, they began filling the bonds with riskier, “subprime” mortgages, despite still rating them highly. The fact that these mortgage bonds were filled with subprime mortgages is what Christian Bale’s Michael Burry discovered.

Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs)

Another crucial financial element in The Big Short is collateralized debt obligations (CDO). In the finance world, CDOs are complex securities that are created by bundling together various forms of debt — in the case of The Big Short , mortgages — into one product. The film's main characters, namely Michael Burry, Jared Vennett, and Mark Baum, realize that the CDOs are filled with subprime mortgages that are likely to default, which would cause their value to collapse. Betting against these CDOs is how the characters end up profiting at the end of The Big Short .

"Shorting" The Market

One main way that The Big Short ’s characters are able to profit off of the anticipated collapse of mortgage bonds and CDOs is through “shorting” the market. This is when an investor borrows a security from a broker and immediately sells it with the hope of the security’s price decreasing , which would allow them to buy it back at a lower price, give it back to the broker, and keep the difference as their profit.

This is how the main characters profited by betting against the CDOs, and the idea of “shorting” the market is ultimately where the title of the movie comes from.

Credit Default Swap

In The Big Short , credit default swaps are insurance contracts that protect against the default of specific financial products , like mortgage bonds or CDOs. After discovering the instability of the mortgage bonds and CDOs leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, The Big Short ’s main characters all bet against them by purchasing credit default swaps.

These credit default swaps are bought under the assumption that those underlying subprime mortgages will default. When they ultimately do at the end of the movie, the main characters receive the payout from the credit default swaps, which is how they end up accruing such a massive profit.

Why Mark Baum Refused To Sell For So Long

Guilt overcame steve carell's character.

Mark Baum (Steve Carell) looks annoyed in The Big Short

While The Big Short changes aspects of the true story , Steve Carell's character, Mark Baum, is based on a real figure involved in the events. Throughout the end of The Big Short , it’s emphasized that Baum continually refuses to sell his position even though others around his team already are. Even when the collapse of the economy is imminent, Baum holds off on selling until the very last moment of the movie.

In Baum’s eyes, if he sold his position, then he would be no better than those other people, whom he considered “ crooks .”

Baum was one of the main characters who was aware of what was going to happen and who would profit massively from the crash, so it initially seems confusing that he refused to sell. However, the reason he held off on selling for so long speaks directly to the values integral to Mark Baum’s character. The Big Short establishes Baum’s distrust of the system and cynical nature when it came to his job and the people around him, and the 2008 financial crisis exposed to him that the system was even worse than he originally thought.

Upon realizing how the crash would affect real people, Baum was disgusted with the careless actions of his contemporaries in profiting off of others’ miseries . In Baum’s eyes, if he sold his position, then he would be no better than those other people, whom he considered “ crooks .” Not selling until the last moment is how Baum attempted to retain his morality, which it was unfortunately too late for.

Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, and Steve Carell in The Big Short.

The Big Short highlights a handful of the individuals who benefited from the 2007 housing market crash – read on for how much money they made.

Why Michael Burry Closed His Hedge Fund

Burry faced immense backlash leading up to his massive profits.

Although The Big Short presents Michael Burry as the first person to realize the truth about the faulty mortgage bonds and bet against them, he ultimately closes his hedge fund at the end of the movie. Burry’s decision to close the fund is initially odd considering his heavy involvement in betting against the market against the wishes of his investors. However, some of his rationale for this decision can be gleaned from the email he drafts at the end of the movie.

According to Michael Burry’s email, during the lead-up to the crash, he became burdened by the pressure and backlash caused by his actions, exemplified by his claim that “ All the people I respected won’t talk to me anymore except through lawyers .” Additionally, Burry began to have difficulty reconciling his actions with the impact that the crash he was betting on would have on real people .

The backlash Burry had been receiving as well as the realization that he was profiting off of the despair of real people is ultimately what led him to close down the hedge fund.

The Big Short’s Interjected Images Of Real People Explained

The movie highlights the real victims of the crisis.

People standing in front of a home in The Big Short

Throughout The Big Short , the movie intersperses its scenes with still images of real people. In the rest of the movie, these still images have several functions, such as grounding audiences in the time period of the movie or showing what was happening in the rest of the world while this impending crisis was happening on Wall Street.

...doing this divorces audiences from the actual humans that the collapse of the bonds impacts, which is the sudden realization that both Michael Burry and Mark Baum eventually have.

However, the appearance of these images ramps up significantly toward the conclusion of the movie, giving The Big Short ’s ending a frenetic yet depressing feeling. Though these images could feel random or distracting, their intensified frequency actually has an important meaning.

Given that The Big Short tells the story of the onset of the 2008 financial crisis from the points of view of investors, the emphasis is often put on the CDOs and making profits off of them. However, doing this divorces audiences from the actual humans that the collapse of the bonds impacts, which is the sudden realization that both Michael Burry and Mark Baum eventually have.

Therefore, these interjected images of real people at the end of The Big Short serve as reminders of the impact of the collapse and financial crisis: the real people who lost their jobs and homes as a result of The Big Short ’s events.

Why Kareem Serageldin Was The Only Trader Sent To Jail For The 2008 Financial Crisis

Settlements allowed many bigger offenders to avoid jail.

Kareem Serageldin standing in the street in The Big Short

A narration from Ryan Gosling’s Jared Vennett at the end of The Big Short reveals that despite the widespread knowledge of wrongdoing by banks and investors in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis, only one person, Kareem Serageldin, was imprisoned for his actions. Serageldin hid several millions in mortgage bond losses for Credit Suisse, which Vennett notes is “ something most of the big banks did on a good day during the crisis .”

If Vennett’s claim that other big banks were doing the same criminal acts as Serageldin during the crisis, it seems bizarre that he was the only one to suffer the consequences. The reason that Kareem Serageldin was the only trader to be imprisoned for his criminal actions reveals the nefarious nature of Wall Street. As Mark Baum predicted, the banks took taxpayers’ money to reimburse themselves, used real people as scapegoats, and lobbied against big reform.

Additionally, the Department of Justice’s focus on reaching settlements rather than prison sentences meant few received real punishments for their actions . This meant that ultimately, there were no meaningful changes put in place, so many people who facilitated the crisis got out unscathed, except Serageldin.

What Happened To The Real Characters After The Big Short's Ending

The epilogue details the aftermath of their success.

During The Big Short ’s epilogue, the fates of several of the characters after the 2008 financial crisis are revealed. The Big Short states that Mark Baum became incredibly gracious after the 2008 financial crisis, which contrasts with his acerbic persona during the movie. In real life, Mark Baum’s inspiration, Steve Eisman, ended up leaving FrontPoint Partners in 2011 and now serves as a managing director and portfolio manager for the Eisman Group. According to The Big Short , Baum’s staff members continue operating their fund in Manhattan.

The Brownfield Capital team has a fairly bittersweet experience after The Big Short . Jamie Shipley and Charlie Geller attempted to sue the rating agencies without success. In the epilogue, it’s revealed that the two investors eventually parted ways, with Jamie still running Brownfield and Charlie moving to Charlotte to start a family. Brad Pitt’s Ben Rickert returned to enjoying his peaceful retirement after the crash, making his ending one of the few overtly happy ones .

While it’s known that Michael Burry closed his hedge fund at the end of The Big Short , it’s also revealed that he has been audited several times by the IRS as well as questioned by the FBI. In 2013, Burry reopened his hedge fund, now called Scion Asset Management. According to the movie’s epilogue, the little investing that Burry still does is focused on water. In August 2023, it was reported that Burry’s hedge fund had placed bets on a U.S. stock market crash, meaning the history shown in The Big Short could potentially repeat itself .

The Real Meaning Of The Big Short Ending

The victories of the main characters are tainted by the loss of the american people.

Several men yelling at Ryan Gosling's Jared Vennett in a board room in The Big Short

The ending of The Big Short is one that recontextualizes the movie that audiences just watched. For much of the runtime, The Big Short is a fun and exciting story about a group of underdogs who, despite everyone else telling them how wrong they were, found an opportunity no one else could see. It was like a heist movie with these characters setting the stage to get a big payoff in the end. However, when that payoff comes, the result is very different from what audiences usually see in these kinds of caper movies.

While there is some satisfaction in seeing characters like Burry proven right and collecting on those risky bets, The Big Short makes the cost of their victories clear. As Rickert points out, they are betting against the American economy and if they're right it will mean a lot of people's lives will be ruined . That is the sentiment in the final scenes of the movie. The victories are bittersweet, with the main characters understanding that the reality of what has happened is a crisis for many and they just happen to be the few who made it out on top.

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The Big Short

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Genre	Comedy
Format	Dolby, Widescreen, Subtitled
Contributor	Marisa Tomei, Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, Melissa Leo, Steve Carrell
Language	English
Runtime	2 hours and 10 minutes

From the manufacturer

When four outsiders saw what the big banks, media and government refused to, the global collapse of the economy, they had an idea: The Big Short. Their bold investment leads them into the dark underbelly of modern banking where they must question everyone and everything. Based on the true story and best-selling book by Michael Lewis (The Blind Side, Moneyball), and directed by Adam McKay (Anchorman, Step Brothers), The Big Short stars Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt.

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Starring	Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill	Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy	Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh	Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams	Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, James Gandolfini
Directed By	Martin Scorsese	John Landis	Brad Anderson	David O. Russell	Gore Verbinski
Original Release	2013	1983	2004	2010	2001
Rating	R	R	R	R	R
Runtime	179 minutes	116 minutes	101 minutes	116 minutes	124 minutes
Format	Blu-ray	Blu-ray	DVD	Blu-ray	DVD
Number of Discs	1	1	1	1	1

Product Description

In the mid-2000s, hedge fund manager Michael Burry (Christian Bale) took a hard look at the subprime mortgage market...and saw the tidal wave of borrower defaults to come. As a handful of financial industry insiders watched him bet billions against the very stability of the banks, they felt themselves torn between knowing the consequence of collapse...and getting themselves a very lucrative piece of that action. Adam McKay’s trenchant take on the ‘08 economic crisis, inspired by the Michael Lewis bestseller, also stars Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Marisa Tomei, Hamish Linklater. 130 min.

Product details

Is Discontinued By Manufacturer ‏ : ‎ No
MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ R (Restricted)
Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 0.7 x 7.5 x 5.4 inches; 2.4 ounces
Item model number ‏ : ‎ 35302950
Media Format ‏ : ‎ Dolby, Widescreen, Subtitled
Run time ‏ : ‎ 2 hours and 10 minutes
Release date ‏ : ‎ March 15, 2016
Actors ‏ : ‎ Brad Pitt, Marisa Tomei, Melissa Leo, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling
Dubbed: ‏ : ‎ English, Portuguese, French, Spanish
Subtitles: ‏ : ‎ English, French, Portuguese, Spanish
Studio ‏ : ‎ Paramount
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0177ZM3LO
Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 2
#125 in Comedy (Movies & TV)

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'Harold and the Purple Crayon' Review: Zachary Levi Capably Unleashes Magical Havoc

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The Big Picture

Harold and the Purple Crayon introduces a "grown-up" Harold who transports his imaginative world to reality using a magic crayon.
The film features well-cast actors playing naive, humorous characters in a conceptually intriguing plot.
Despite promising elements, the movie's narrative, thematic, and plot developments frequently fall short in execution.

As the history of fiction, film, and television would have you believe, imagination is quite possibly the greatest power in the universe . Necessity may be the mother of invention, but imagination is its father. Many world religions posit omnipotent beings of vast power who can do great feats with nothing more than a thought. Comic books give us characters like The Beyonders, Franklin Richards, Doctor Manhattan , or the various Lanterns of Green Lantern lore , who can conjure or manipulate all sorts of objects or beings with their minds alone. Children’s programming, like Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood , constantly reminds children to embrace the power of their creativity. The 1955 children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon , written and drawn by Crockett Johnson , welcomes children with exactly this dream-fulfilling wish: what if a child had a magic device that allowed them to create literally anything they could dream of?

The book spawned a series of follow-up stories following Harold and his various experiences and adventures, and Carlos Saldanha ’s Harold and the Purple Crayon is, at its core, a sequel of sorts to them. The film stars Zachary Levi as a version of Harold who has grown into an adult (of sorts) in his imagination-built world, along with his friends, Moose ( Lil Rel Howery ) and Porcupine ( Tanya Reynolds ). He interacts with the 'Old Man,' the godlike narrator ( Harold series author Crockett Johnson, as voiced by Alfred Molina ) who created Harold and his world to begin with. One day, Harold decides to venture out and find the Old Man in his world, our real-life world, pouring Harold, Moose, and Porcupine into our reality and setting in motion a surreal set of experiences for the innocent, cartoonish character. There are quite a few elements to like about Harold , including its smart casting, entertaining meta-concepts, and its ability to find humor in chaos, but it's a film with nearly as many conceptual, narrative, and thematic misses as hits .

Harold and the Purple Crayon

A young boy named Harold embarks on a magical mission with the help of his purple crayon

What is 'Harold and the Purple Crayon' About?

Harold technically grew up in the world the Old Man created, channeling his imagination through the purple crayon to provide anything his heart conceives and desires , but in a way, he didn’t grow up at all. In this world of pure imagination, anything he needed or desired was provided by the Old Man or his own creative powers, so he was spared from many of the realities of our world. These realities create a mystery for Harold when, seemingly out of nowhere, the Old Man stops speaking. It’s unsettling for Harold and his friends because he has never been without the Old Man's voice, so Harold decides to use his magic crayon to create a door to our world (with Moose and Porcupine in tow).

The purple crayon still has imagination-fueled, reality-warping powers in our world, but there are a few differences --Moose and Porcupine are human (though the former turns into an actual moose at times when scared). As they set out to find the Old Man, Harold and crew encounter widow Terri ( Zooey Deschanel ) and her son Mel ( Benjamin Bottani ) during a dangerous encounter with Terri's car, and eventually find an antagonist in failed writer/nefarious librarian Gary Naswich ( Jemaine Clement ).

It's an interesting route to take for the live-action adaptation of a beloved children's book . Making the narrative a live-action entry following an adult Harold in our own world, the world of the series' author, does allow for a wider (and more cinematic) range of circumstances than merely the simple story of a boy using a crayon to draw things like animal friends out of thin air. It's additionally an interesting way to play with the implications of the purple crayon. First, in our real world, an overgrown child warping reality would create massive chaos and confusion, which is great for both humor and drama. Second, the books have a cartoon Harold creating objects that are a bit rougher in style and form than himself (his creations are in one color of crayon, after all), while his creations here are in our real world, permitting extravagant detail (though still purple as ever). Finally, it's a unique opportunity for Harold, a creator, to examine his own existence as a subordinate creation (it's an opportunity that the film doesn't make full use of, but the potential is there). All this makes Harold and the Purple Crayon one of the wilder live-action, young-audience-friendly films in recent years.

'Harold' is a Conceptually-Interesting but Muddled Meta-Movie

The leads in Harold and the Purple Crayon are, overall, well cast. Zachary Levi continues to cement his tradition of playing naive, childlike characters in grown men's bodies , but it largely works in the portrayal of a man in ignorance of the realities of our world . Zooey Deschanel embodies Terri sufficiently well, which is no surprise given her seasoned ability to portray characters shepherding childishly naive, sheltered grown men from supernatural realms ( Elf , anyone?) through the dangers of human cities. Lil Rel Howery and Tanya Reynolds are consistently solid and charming as Moose and Porcupine, despite being accidentally hampered by their curious removal from major plot moments (especially with respect to the latter). Jemaine Clement shows he has the makings of a properly menacing villain, and he does his best here, but the material undermines his character's potential threat by emphasizing his family-friendly 'goofy failure' nature. There's a solid cast here with real potential, but the plotting in practice makes for a mixed bag at times.

Conceptually, Harold is one of the wilder live-action movies for young demographics that we've had in recent years. Sure, IF recently reminded us of the imaginative powers of children and encouraged us to find our own, sometimes reality-warping abilities (even if it's only in our perception alone). However, while that did give imagined beings some odd power to impact our world, they never achieve the nigh-omnipotence of Harold and his creative implement. That said, these concepts aren't always fully or consistently explained and utilized in Harold . The film is a love letter to the power of imagination and effectively implies that when creators create worlds they really create worlds. Thus, Crockett's creation of a character who is himself a world creator is, we can infer, the reason he can breach into our reality... but we have to guess to make the logic work. Of course, this provokes messy questions. Do all authors create worlds so thoroughly that sufficiently world-bending characters could enter our realm? Will our viewing of Deadpool & Wolverine see Deadpool slice the screen and steal our popcorn on his next fourth wall break? Will Calvin and Hobbes ' Calvin imagine a way off the page, making our snow into an icy army? Cleaner answers would be welcome, but it's nice to have a younger-skewing film provoke entertaining and novel thoughts, even if it fails to provide satisfactory answers.

Amanda and Rudger soar through the sky in ‘The Imaginary’

'The Imaginary' Review: Netflix Does Its Best Studio Ghibli Impression

This animated wonder of a movie explores a breathtaking world while remaining grounded in the emotions of our own.

Of course, these aren't the only questions that Harold provokes and leaves unanswered. When Harold and friends enter our world, Harold enters as a grown human man in pajamas, but Moose and Porcupine are turned into humans in normal human clothes. Why? It's not because weird animals can't exist in our world--once here, the crayon creates both otherworldly oddities and photo-realistic animals alike, so the change isn't necessary. Why is the worldly and cynical Terri so nonplussed about two odd men (who she claims not to trust) showing up in stalker-level quantities, especially in the orbit of her son, and causing problems in her life? She's the Dana Scully of the bunch, never believing in magic reality-warping crayons, so she'd have no reason to put up with any of them outside the characters' first scenes together. A tragic revelation at one point in the film threatens Harold's powers of imagination, but it's too simply resolved with the slightest of pep talks from another character. Again, given the set-up, why was it that easy? And why is it that, here, Harold's creative abilities are threatened, but his own existence doesn't seem to be?

As much as the film has its charms, it's also muddled in its plotting and thematic development. It provokes interesting themes about creation and imagination , about dealing with loss, and about growing up, but it doesn't develop them consistently enough to make them shine. It utilizes both the naivety of Harold, Moose, and Porcupine in our world and the chaos of their world-altering magic for humor, but the latter is much more successful than the former. Certain performances make for memorable characters, but odd plotting choices sideline the characters or render them aimless or silly. A lot of imagination went into this celebration of imagination, but many of its best elements are weighed down by missteps.

'Harold' Has Real Promise, But Regularly Stops Short Of Reaching It

Lil Rel Howery as Moose holding his hands up and looking scared and confused.

As a film intended for younger audiences, Harold takes interestingly large conceptual swings , boasts solid character adaptations, and has some scenes and humorous moments that work. For its intended younger audience, the film's visual creations and situational humor might work wonders, and Levi does capably portray a magical adult child unleashing havoc in our world. At the same time, a little honing throughout is much needed to tighten the film's humor, themes, emotional core, and narrative plotting. It's entertaining enough for its brief and breezy runtime, but for the thoughtful viewer, it will continuously provoke narrative and thematic questions of the kind that should be at least plausibly resolved by the time filming commences. It is a somewhat decent movie hampered by so many preventable oversights and missteps.

Harold and the Purple Crayon Film Poster

'Harold and the Purple Crayon' boasts a solid cast and an entertaining, surprisingly meta plot, but many of its narrative turns and concepts leave too many questions.

It boasts a strong cast, with Zachary Levi working well as a naive character adrift in our world.
It's an unexpectedly strong concept that provokes interesting questions and provides some solid moments of comedy.
For younger viewers, the humor and creations might indeed work wonders.
Some plot elements fail to make adequate sense (even given the film's magical crayon plot device).
Many strong cast members are either underutilized in key moments or underdeveloped.
Some of the film's most interesting themes are muddled and haphazardly handled.

Harold and the Purple Crayon releases in theaters in the U.S. on August 1. Check below for showtimes near you.

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Bella Hadid Wears the Naked Dress to End All Naked Dresses

Image may contain Bella Hadid Adult Person Camera Electronics Clothing Footwear Shoe High Heel and Accessories

Anthony Vaccarello finally figured out how to reproduce his collection of ultra-sheer pantyhose dresses. Bella Hadid hit Cannes in look seven from the Saint Laurent fall 2024 show: a halter dress featuring 10 denier hosiery cups, a knotted pantyhose bodice, and a below-the-knee skirt with a control top hemline.

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Hadid, styled by Molly Dickson, leaned into the Old Hollywood glamour that has become synonymous with the Cannes Film Festival, adding a pair of mahogany peep-toe ankle strap heels and an enormous pair of drop earrings from Chopard.

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This look fits into Hadid’s latest sartorial M.O. of sheer earthy tones that can only be described as “sexy nymph.” While promoting her fragrance, Orebella, in New York, the model wore a diaphanous nude Dior slip dress by John Galliano, as well as a cream-colored Rokh dress with a lace bodice. And yesterday in Cannes, she further explored brown tones in a simple tank dress . But this look—with only some extremely well-placed seams preserving her modesty—is by far her boldest to date.

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When asked about how he would manufacture these ephemeral pieces from the collection, Vaccarello told Vogue, “Don’t even ask me about production—I can’t tell you.” This being the first instance the delicate outfits have been spotted on the red carpet speaks to Hadid’s risk-taking style. Even if she is the only person who ever wears one of these sheer Saint Laurent looks out in the world (let’s see if she can make it to the end of the night without any snags) the fact that Vaccarello was readily willing to make one for her speaks to Hadid’s immense power in the fashion industry.

And if this is Hadid’s wardrobe for her first official day of events in Cannes? We can only imagine what’s to come.

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Every MCU movie villain ranked, from the worst to the worst of the worst

An artful composite featuring Marvel villains from across the cinematic universe, animated with bright colors.

Mashable’s Ranked series crowns the best and sorts the rest.

It's funny to look back on the MCU and realize these tales of epic heroism began with a spoiled nepo baby taking down his wicked-hearted business partner. But the Marvel Cinematic Universe has come a long, long way from Obadiah Stane and his iron-monging ways. Over 30 movies and counting, the baddies have gotten badder and badder — in great ways.

To toast the unveiling of Deadpool & Wolverine, who officially bring the X-Men crew into the MCU, let's look back at all the villains who got us here.

How do Mr. Paradox and Cassandra Nova stack up to the likes of Loki, Thanos, and Killmonger? Find out with our thorough ranking of MCU villains, beginning with the least gnarly and ending with the biggest of bads.

45. Malekith (Thor: The Dark World)

Closeup of a pale, pointed figure with a sharp metal crown and dark robes: Malekith (Christopher Eccleston), the leader of the dark elves.

Literally who? * — Angie Han, Deputy Entertainment Editor

44. Dormammu (Doctor Strange)

I still don't entirely understand what Dormammu is, and I don't care. And if you're about to launch into an explanation based on the comics, my point is that the movie doesn't do a good job of explaining what he is or why I should care. * — A.H.

43. Ivan Vanko (Iron Man 2)

With his gold teeth, thick Russian accent, and pet cockatoo, Vanko is basically a latter-day Johnny Depp character — and as with most latter-day Johnny Depp characters, there doesn't seem to be anything like an actual person underneath all those tiresome affectations. * — A.H.

42. The Dweller-in-Darkness (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings)

The Dweller-in-Darkness is the CGI manifestation of studio executives flipping through the screenplay of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and realizing that there’s nothing in there that would make a cool Lego set. It’s not on the very bottom of the list because all it wants to do is eat snacks (relatable), and everyone after this entry is in Marvel’s clown car of really bad villain ideas. — Alexis Nedd, Senior Entertainment Reporter

41. Aldrich Killian (Iron Man 3)

The reveal that the Mandarin was really a role being played by Ben Kingsley's Trevor Slattery was a jaw-dropper, but the truth about who was really pulling the strings was far more disappointing. Not even Killian's embittered-nerd backstory can make him a compelling foil to Tony Stark. * — A.H.

40. Ronan the Accuser (Guardians of the Galaxy)

A blue alien being, male presenting, in ornate robes and a hood: Ronan (Lee Pace) in "Guardians of the Galaxy."

Ronan gets more laughs than most of the other villains on this list, which could push him up a couple slots. But that's mostly because he's just in a funnier movie than most of the other villains on this list, not because he himself is all that funny. So he moves back down toward the bottom. * — A.H.

39. Justin Hammer (Iron Man 2)

Justin Hammer is essentially another Tony Stark, only inferior in every possible way. Which shouldn't be that interesting, except that Sam Rockwell makes him kind of an odious oddball. It's fun to watch him try to take down Stark, and even more satisfying to watch him fail again and again. * — A.H.

38. Abomination (The Incredible Hulk)

There's the germ of something interesting in Emil Blonsky, an aging soldier who agrees to undergo a painful experimental procedure in order to achieve Hulk-like power. Unfortunately, The Incredible Hulk never gets there, and by the end has reduced him to a mindless CGI monster. * — A.H.

37. Ayesha (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2)

Ayesha is essentially just a superiority complex dipped in gold, but so much of the fun of her character comes from seeing her haughty grandeur rub up against the goofy, grimy world of the Guardians. Here's hoping she'll get more to do once Adam emerges .* — A.H.

36. Dar-Benn (The Marvels)

Zawe Ashton is Dar-Benn in "The Marvels."

She’s got a cool warhammer (the universal weapon), some powerful jewelry (quantum band), and some tooth bling for extra flair. But this revenge-fueled wannabe savior of the Kree just feels like a retread of lesser cosmic villains who’ve come before, like Malekith and Ronan. Angry, conquering, blah. Uncluttered by egregious prosthetic makeup, Zawe Ashton’s performance isn’t swallowed up like those of her predecessors. Still, there’s not much there there. — Kristy Puchko, Entertainment Editor

35. Yon-Rogg (Captain Marvel)

A man in a green metal alien suit with his head exposed: Jude Law as Yon-Rogg in "Captain Marvel."

Carol Danvers' fragile masculine captor isn't particularly interesting, but not for the first time Marvel gets by on some inspired casting — and in this case, a few well-placed twists. When Carol is about to blast him to Kree-Kingdom-Come during their final showdown, Yon-Rogg encourages her to strike him, to defeat him. It's so hubristic and patronizing (what's the Kree word for "mansplain?") that Carol decides she'd rather just dip. — Proma Khosla, Entertainment Reporter

34. Obadiah Stane (Iron Man)

Obadiah Stane fits so many of the MCU villain tropes we've become familiar with: He's a greedy businessman and a false father figure, and he's vastly less interesting than the superhero he's out to get. What makes him first among equals is that he was literally the first, setting the mold for years to come.* — A.H.

33. Goliath and Ghost (Ant-Man and the Wasp)

Sharing a spot on the list because they share so many villainous goals, the foes of Ant-Man and the Wasp are pretty textbook. Goliath, aka Bill Foster, has beef with Hank Pym (a man who specializes in beef) and wants revenge, while Ghost, aka Ava, just wants to stop phasing and not die. They team up to harness the energy of the Quantum Realm, which interferes with Hank and Hope's plan to rescue Janet, but by the end of the movie everyone realizes what a viewer probably caught early on: There's a version of this plan where everyone wins. — P.K.

32. Kaecilius (Doctor Strange)

A man with dark makeup around his eyes and a low, short ponytail, wearing robes. In the background, the city of Hong Kong is under attack.

Now we're really getting down to the dregs. Kaecilius is yet another MCU antagonist who lusts after some abstract notion of power. However, he wins a couple points for that flawless eye look and hilarious who's-on-first routine. — A.H.

31. Arishem the Judge (Eternals)

The Eternals' Celestial space-robot daddy is one of the most powerful beings on this list, but fails to make a proportionate impression because he is in fact a CGI space robot with no face. Arishem is the reason the Eternals even exist. He makes villains of them and their Deviant foes by basically using everyone as chess pieces — if a game of chess ended with the Earth being destroyed to create a cosmic superbeing. Arishem isn't evil in the way of someone like Thanos; Celestials operate on ancient universal laws, while Thanos acted out of hubris — but what they all have in common is the view that most mortal life is unremarkable and therefore unessential. Hopefully Sersi, Kingo, and Phastos can convince him otherwise. — P.K.

30. Thunderbolt Ross (The Incredible Hulk)

General Ross doesn't get the big showdown with Hulk (that dubious honor goes to Abomination), but for the first two-thirds of the movie, he's a rather chilling portrayal of a man so obsessed with revenge that he's blind to the fact that he's become a monster in his own right. — A.H.

29. Adam Warlock (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3)

Adam Warlock, a man with shiny gold skin and a diamond on his forehead, wearing a suit of space armor with a red cape.

Don't get me wrong, Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) is a ton of fun. This golden battle mage swoops into Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 early on and basically pounds them into the dirt. After that, though, we see he's more of a childlike himbo than a supervillain. For the rest of the movie, he mostly screams "Mother!" (which, fair, when you're talking about Elizabeth Debicki as Ayesha) and hangs out with furry cutie Blurp . Good news, though: By the end of the film, he's become a new Guardian of the Galaxy, so we're in for more non-villainous Adam down the line. — Belen Edwards, Entertainment Reporter

28. Dreykov (Black Widow)

While far from the most charismatic or memorable villain on this list, Dreykov is pretty damn sinister when you think about what he's done. He kidnapped orphans to turn them into soldiers, and he made a point to pick children with uteruses so he could forcibly sterilize them. He turned his own daughter into a barely-sentient killing machine and seemed pleased as punch — incidentally, Natasha (and the rest of us) really want to punch him. Eff this guy. — P.K.

27. Yellowjacket (Ant-Man)

He's essentially Obadiah Stane Redux, minus the shock of realizing that, holy shit, it's Jeff Bridges under that chrome dome. Yellowjacket was just one too many wounded male egos plotting against the MCU's heroes, which perhaps mercifully led to the new era that followed. Sorry, Corey Stoll. We love you, just not this role for you. * — A.H.

26. M.O.D.O.K. (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania)

Darren Cross/Yellowjacket gets an upgrade after being banished to the Quantum Realm, where he is remade by Kang the Conqueror (more on him later) to be a Mechanized Organism Designed Only for Killing. M.O.D.O.K. is mostly a gag villain thanks to his teeny little arms and legs and frankly massive head — apologies should be in order for nightmarishly stretching Corey Stoll's face like this. But M.O.D.O.K also has some of the funniest lines in an otherwise meh movie , and Stoll is clearly having a blast. At least he died an Avenger, right? Right? — B.E.

25. Trevor/The Mandarin (Iron Man 3)

To this day, the reveal of the Mandarin's true identity is one of the most shocking twists that the MCU has ever pulled off — and Ben Kingsley plays both sides beautifully. He's chilling as the Mandarin but delightfully daft as Trevor, the party-bro actor who has no idea what's really going on.* — A.H.

24. Taskmaster (Black Widow)

Taskmaster is Black Widow’ s main antagonist for most of the movie, and while they don’t do much beyond showing up and kicking ass, that ass-kicking is some of the best in the MCU. Tasky’s fight scenes are a highlight reel of every Avenger’s coolest moves, and half the fun of watching Black Widow is seeing how Natasha would actually fare if she squared up against Captain America, Bucky (again), Black Panther, and herself. Also, points awarded for having a cool third act reveal. Best wishes to you, Taskmaster. — A.N.

23. Alexander Pierce (Captain America: The Winter Soldier)

Like Vulture and Zemo, Alexander Pierce is a relatively understated villain. But he's got gravitas, because he's played by Robert Freakin' Redford, and he raises some genuinely complicated questions about security versus freedom. Well, at least until it's revealed that he's been a Hydra agent all along, and therefore unambiguously evil. Oh, well.* — A.H.

22. Red Skull (Captain America: The First Avenger)

Red Skull is a really good representation of another annoying MCU villain trend: squandered promise. He's played by Hugo Weaving and based on a popular comic book character, so he seems like he should be amazing. But onscreen, he comes across as just another generic nemesis.* — A.H.

21. Ulysses Klaue (Avengers: Age of Ultron, Black Panther)

Ulysses Klaue is a villain who died before he really got to live. Mostly in the sense that it would've been wild to see Andy Serkis' take on the comics, but Klaue served his purpose in the MCU's ongoing story. It's Klaue who smuggled vibranium out of Wakanda, a singular act that directly leads to Killmonger's plot to establish Wakanda as a fearsome ruling superpower. Without that vibranium, where would Ultron's consciousness end up after he escaped Tony's computer system? It's impossible to know what the MCU would look like without Klaue's impact, and that's what makes him one of the saga's essential villains. — Adam Rosenberg, Senior Entertainment Reporter & Weekend Editor

20. Ego (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2)

Talk about villains grounded in painful reality. Kurt Russell is perfect as Ego, the personification of every dashing deadbeat who's ever refused to let minor details like "a child" stand in the way of his grand ambitions. It's just that his grand ambitions involve remaking the entire galaxy.* — A.H.

19. Kang the Conqueror (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania)

Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror sits in a golden throne wearing purple and green armor.

Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) is one of Marvel Comics' biggest villains, and he's been hyped up as the big bad of Phases 5 and 6 of the MCU . So why was he such a letdown? Maybe it's the fact that his introductory movie simply isn't very good , or maybe it's that his power set isn't defined well beyond "shooting blue beams" and "blathering on and on about how he can see time." Or maybe it's that you need to have watched Loki to have even the slightest understanding of who he is . Whatever the reason, he's just not popping yet — and that's a gargantuan problem. At least Majors seems to be having fun, I guess. — B.E.

18. Winter Soldier (Captain America: The Winter Soldier)

Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) as the winter soldier; masked, armed, and holding Captain America's shield to use against him as a weapon.

Bucky is only a true villain in Winter Soldier , and then just because he's been brainwashed by Hydra. Maybe that's a shame, because it turns out he's pretty good at being bad. He's all ruthless efficiency and controlled intensity, but his real secret weapon as a supervillain is his tragic backstory.* — A.H.

17. Ultron (Avengers: Age of Ultron)

A sort of sentient robot son to Tony Stark, Ultron sounds cooler in theory than he actually is in execution. But he is voiced by James Spader in mustache-twirling villain mode, and he's the kind of unapologetic drama queen who insists on having his own throne. That's not nothing.* — A.H.

16. Hela (Thor: Ragnarok)

Odin’s firstborn and the goddess of death, Hela is a formidable foe for Thor. She breaks Mjolnir! She kills the Warriors Three with her knife-y powers! She’s played by Cate Blanchett! Even though Hela is sidelined for much of Thor: Ragnarok , Blanchett imbues her with delightfully chilling villainy. Also, her outfit is among the best villain outfits in the MCU — talk about being dressed to kill. — B.E.

15. Gorr the God Butcher (Thor: Love and Thunder)

Say what you will about Thor: Love and Thunder , there's no denying that Christian Bale makes for an amazing villain. Drape that man in a sinister cloak, put the Necrosword in his hand, and give him a tragic backstory, and you're looking at MCU villain gold. Gorr's grief-fueled quest to kill all gods in the universe is Love and Thunder 's most compelling storyline. While the film doesn't examine it quite as much as I wish it would, it still gives us Gorr being the world's most terrifying babysitter. Absolutely immaculate villain vibes. — B.E.

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14. Mysterio (Spider-Man: Far From Home)

On paper, Mysterio looks like a pedestrian amalgam of Vulture, Justin Hammer, and Aldrich Killian — but the formula doesn't account for Jake Gyllenhaal chewing the absolute heck out of this role. In Mysterio, Gyllenhaal finds layers of sincerity (with Peter), egomania (with his team), and outright unhinged madness that is nothing short of delightful to behold. How did Tony Stark ever overlook this guy? — P.K.

13. The Grandmaster (Thor: Ragnarok)

Jeff Goldblum as The Grandmaster in "Thor Ragnarok," wearing gold robes and a strip of blue makeup on his chin paired with a spiky hairdo.

Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum) may not be Thor: Ragnarok 's main villain, but the hedonistic leader of Sakaar more than steals the show. Everything from his sparkly blue makeup to his funky piano jam sessions oozes funky, offbeat charisma — even when he’s forcing unwilling fighters to battle his champion to the death. Arguably the most fun Marvel villain, thanks in no small part to Goldblum doing what he does best, Grandmaster is just a blast to watch. — B.E.

12. Helmut Zemo (Captain America: Civil War)

In contrast to the colorful, power-mad personalities we've come to expect from comic book movies, Zemo is a quiet, unassuming man driven by grief. Best of all, the guy's kind of got a point when he notes that the Avengers are responsible for a lot of collateral damage.* — A.H.

11. The High Evolutionary (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3)

The High Evolutionary, a man with a skin mask of his face stretched over a robot head.

Hoo boy, this guy is evil. In his quest to develop the perfect utopian species — so, space eugenics? — The High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji) tortures and mutilates sweet, innocent animals like Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper). Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 does not pull its punches when depicting the horror of The High Evolutionary's experiments, a choice that brings the MCU to its darkest places yet while solidifying just how horrendous its villain is. The High Evolutionary gets bonus points on this villain ranking for his frightening face mask and Iwuji's capital "D" Dramatic performance, which brings high Shakespearean theatrics to The High Evolutionary. Truly an irredeemable monster of a villain. — B.E.

10. Mr. Paradox (Deadpool & Wolverine)

Some Marvel villains have been given mystical armies, unnerving prosthetic makeovers, and/or elaborate backstories sparked from petty grievances. Mr. Paradox doesn't need any of that to be a terrific villain. Sure, at first glance, he just seems like a British suit with a smug attitude. But props to Succession 's Matthew Macfadyen, who's made being a power-hungry weasel into an art. Paradox's plan is one of timeline annihilation, coldly killing off millions of beings because he thinks the timelines are tidier that way. That's deeply evil and unhinged. But what makes Paradox marvelous is Macfadyen's delivery. Whether he's providing a dense exposition dump, dressing down Deadpool for relying on the "Worst Wolverine," or squawking for help when his master plan goes kabluey, the theatrical energy and snarling self-satisfaction makes for a foe that's an absolute hoot to hate. — K.P.

9. Vulture (Spider-Man: Homecoming)

Vulture is a basically normal dude grappling with the fact that he lives in a superpowered world — but unlike our heroes, Adrian Toomes isn't inspired by example to become one of the good guys. He channels that rage into a successful black-market enterprise selling alien weaponry, but what's fascinating about Adrian is there's much more to him than supervillainy. He doesn't seem to be playing a role in the way that, say, Obadiah Stane was only pretending to be Tony's friend so he could stab him in the back later. Adrian really is a family man, and he really is an illegal arms dealer. He contains multitudes, and Homecoming doesn't shy away from it.* — A.H.

8. Namor (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever)

With his winged ankles, green hot pants, and strength to rival the Hulk's, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever's Namor (Tenoch Huerta) bursts onto the scene with a tremendous amount of flair. But Namor is so much more than his appearance. A backstory involving his Yucatec-Mayan people fleeing from European colonizers sets the stage for his compelling motivations: wanting to keep his people and their home of Talokan safe. Like Black Panther 's Killmonger, his reasoning makes sense and initially positions him more as an antihero. Also like Killmonger, his violent methods quickly plunge him into villainy, making for a layered Marvel antagonist who is also a blast to watch. — B.E.

7. Cassandra Nova (Deadpool & Wolverine)

Emma Corrin as Cassandra Nova in "Deadpool and Wolverine."

She's the evil twin of X-Men leader Charles Xavier, which means Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin) shares his skills for telepathy and telekinesis. But you know, without all those pesky moral codes weighing her down. Content to rule over the temporal wastelands, Cassandra developed a creepy crew of X-men villains while building a fort in the rotted-out suit of a lost Giant Man. But once she meets Deadpool and Logan, her ambition grows from dystopian tyrant to eradicator of all existence. And if that goal alone isn't enough to commend her as a top-tier MCU villain, consider how her superpower involves stretching her fingers deep into her victims' brains. Watching Paradox's eyes wiggle as she treats his skull like a bowling ball is one of the creepiest things the MCU has offered yet. — K.P.

6. Wanda Maximoff (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness)

A woman with red hair in a red dress and a red tiara.

We can discuss at length how Wanda Maximoff deserved better throughout her time in the MCU, but we can also give her major props for being an exceptional villain in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness . Elizabeth Olsen is clearly having the time of her life as the film's big bad, channeling horror film legends like Samara from The Ring and Carrie White from Carrie . She also annihilates years' worth of fan service in the film's most diabolical sequence. On top of all that, Wanda's villainy comes after several movies and an entire TV show 's worth of character development. So, our attachment makes her turn to the dark side both engrossing and painful to watch. Hats off to Olsen for a killer performance, and here's hoping Wanda is having a better time somewhere else in the multiverse. — B.E.

5. Green Goblin (Spider-Man: No Way Home)

No Way Home may have brought back every notable Spider-Man villain since 2002 (sorry, Hobgoblin), but Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin is a magnificent standout as he urges them all to go rogue. This character once laid the groundwork for the misguided-scientist-who-turns-into-a-bad-experiment that every Spidey villain followed until Vulture, and his performance is as unhinged and spectacular as it was 20 years ago. Sliding back into Goblin’s armor, madness, and signature cackle, Dafoe reminds us that he all but invented the modern comic book movie villain, that everyone else here is in the house that Goblin built. It’s a hell of a legacy to leave behind in the first place, and even mightier to live up to it yourself. — P.K.

4. Loki (Thor, The Avengers)

There's a reason Loki is the rare baddie to stick around for more than one movie ( and a whole TV show ). He's the only MCU supervillain who's as fully developed as the MCU superheroes — and with his sad tale of familial angst, he's almost as sympathetic. Plus, Tom Hiddleston gives Loki a slippery, smirky charisma that's hard to resist. You listen to one of his faux-Shakespearean monologues and tell me you're not tempted to cross over to the dark side.* — A.H.

3. Wenwu (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings)

Wenwu (Tony Leung) in the middle of martial arts combat. He wears ten thick bracelets on his forearms, which are the magical Ten Rings.

Leave it to Hong Kong cinema icon Tony Leung to show up 25 movies into the MCU and proceed to wipe the floor with almost every other villain the franchise has come up with. Wenwu is a fascinating villain because he’s a bad guy who isn’t always a bad person , and the real tragedy of Shang-Chi is knowing Wenwu is mourning more than the loss of his wife — he’s mourning the lost possibility of his own redemption. Also, he’s a Marvel villain who keeps another Marvel villain as a human pet. That’s god-tier villainy right there. — A.N.

2. Eric Killmonger (Black Panther)

Hot off the heels of Vulture revolutionizing MCU villainy came Michael B. Jordan's legendary turn in Black Panther . Eric is everything T'Challa isn't: vengeful, embittered, and deeply isolated. His methods might be villainous, but his message is compelling. Growing up in Oakland, far from the promise of Wakanda, he mourns generations of injustice that Black people have experienced around the world, seething with envy at T'Challa and his supposedly charmed life. Killmonger's pain stays with us long after the credits roll on Black Panther , as does his chilling final line. — P.K.

1. Thanos (Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame)

Thanos (Josh Brolin), a large purple alien with a large textured chin, stands in front of the burning wreckage of his attack on Earth.

Here we go. The big bad. The biggest bad. In one *snap,* Thanos erased half of the known universe from existence — but it's more than that. The build-up to Thanos pretty much defined the entire pace of the MCU's first truly sprawling story arc, from Iron Man to Endgame . Marvel spent 10 entire years teasing and setting up this massive villain before 2018's Avengers: Infinity War gave him an outwardly significant role to play. It was a hell of a trick, and it wouldn't have worked without the decade of buildup making it clear that a larger, more malevolent puppet-master was always pulling the strings just out of view. There are more exciting villains in the MCU, but Thanos is, as ever, inevitable. — A.R.

*This blurb appeared on a previous list.

UPDATE: Jul. 23, 2024, 4:15 p.m. EDT Originally published on Sept. 9, 2021, this list has been updated to include the latest MCU releases.

Topics Marvel

Kristy Puchko is the Film Editor at Mashable. Based in New York City, she's an established film critic and entertainment reporter, who has traveled the world on assignment, covered a variety of film festivals, co-hosted movie-focused podcasts, interviewed a wide array of performers and filmmakers, and had her work published on RogerEbert.com, Vanity Fair, and The Guardian. A member of the Critics Choice Association and GALECA as well as a Top Critic on Rotten Tomatoes, Kristy's primary focus is movies. However, she's also been known to gush over television, podcasts, and board games. You can follow her on Twitter.

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A high-powered CEO puts her career and family on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much younger intern. A high-powered CEO puts her career and family on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much younger intern. A high-powered CEO puts her career and family on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much younger intern.

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