Marketing and Movies: The Big Short

It's so scary because it's so real

Happy Tuesday, y’all! Please Like and Restack this issue to help increase its visibility on Substack. Thank you! And if you are receiving value from my articles, please consider supporting me by subscribing to Backstage Pass. Free subscribers get access to all articles as they come out, after one month, older articles are paywalled. Paid subscribers have access to all Backstage Pass content with no paywalls. Paid Subscribers also have access to The Vault.

This month’s edition of Marketing and Movies covers The Big Short. This article will discuss spoilers about the movie so please do not read further if you haven’t seen the movie yet. And please watch it if you haven’t. It’s an amazingly important film.

“Based on a True Story”

Up until around 10-15 years ago, I was the biggest ‘conspiracy theory’ skeptic you could find. All someone had to say was “Hey, have you heard the conspiracy theory about…” and I had already stopped listening. Conspiracy theories were a waste of time and energy to me.

Let’s just say…my views toward conspiracy theories have changed a bit since then.

Case in point: How many of you have heard of and seen the movie The Big Short? I had never seen or heard of it till about a year ago. Now I can’t stop thinking about it.

Most movies are lucky if they have an A-List actor in its cast. Rarely, you will find a movie with two true A-listers.

The Big Short has four. Christian Bale (nominated for an Academy Award for his performance), Steve Carell, Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling. And all give outstanding performances. Plus cameos by celebs appearing as themselves, including pop star Selena Gomez, actor Margot Robbie, and the late Anthony Bourdain.

Additionally, The Big Short has very strong ratings. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 89% fresh rating. IMDb gave it a 7.8 out of 10 stars and Google has it at 4.7 out of 5 stars.

On paper, The Big Short checks every box to be a box office monster: All-star cast, all-star performances, based on a true story that the world had gone through just a few years prior to its release, wonderful reviews by critics and movie goers.

And to be fair, The Big Short did fairly well at the box office. It grossed $133 million on a budget of around $50 million.

But again…it felt like it should have been much bigger than it was. The former conspiracy skeptic from 10-15 years ago wouldn’t have even noticed.

But today…I wonder.

The Big Short tells the story of the events that led up to the housing market collapse in 2008 and the economic fallout from it. More than that, it pulls back the curtain on the massive amounts of fraud, incompetence and greed that happened in multiple industries, even the US government.

More than once, my jaw dropped during a scene as the actors explained what had happened. More than once I had to stop the movie and quickly research a claim the film had made.

The Big Short is designed to educate us on exactly what happened in the 2008 financial crisis. And it does its job very well. Maybe TOO well.

The Big Short progresses as multiple investors and firms converge independently on the same stark reality: The US housing market is being propped up by investments that are highly speculative and insanely risky. The reason why most people never noticed is because these very risky investments were being packaged by banks as being excellent investments.

“They’re Not Confessing, They’re Bragging”

Steve Carell plays the role of hedge fund manager Mark Baum and via a chance meeting, he discovers that the housing market may be on much shakier ground than anyone realizes. If that’s the case, it gives his firm a chance to make a lot of money by literally shorting the housing market. So his team takes a road trip to Miami to do some field research and learn for themselves what is actually happening:

This exchange led to my first jaw-drop while watching this movie:

“So do applicants ever get rejected?”

Mortgage brokers burst into laughter

“Seriously? Look, if they get rejected, I suck at my job!”

“Even if they have no money?”

“My firm offers NINJA loans, No Income No Job.”

As you can see from these scenes, all these traders, investors and firms begin to come to the same realizations. First, they realize that there IS a housing bubble, and as such, there IS a way for them to make a LOT of money off it.

But as we see in the above scene, that realization also comes with a far darker one: If their big financial bet pays off, it means a lot of everyday Americans are going to lose everything. Their jobs, their homes, their savings. Possibly even their lives.

Before watching The Big Short, I was not a huge Steve Carell fan. I thought he was spectacular in this film. Watching him serve as a sort of moral stand in for the audience as he learns layer by layer how insanely corrupt the banks are being is fascinating. I found myself having the exact same stunned reactions that Carell was having as I watched this story unfold.

Throughout the movie, we see as the other characters in the movie look for a way to exploit the corruption of the banks for their own personal gain. Mark Baum, more than anyone else in the film, is also driven by a need to see the banks be held accountable for their corruption. Even when his own team begs him to sell his swaps, he refuses. He says that making the banks ‘feel the pain’ is the goal, even moreso than realizing a profit for his investors.

And in the end, he also came to the realization that in some small way, he was participating in the crisis. He was making a lot of money off a lot of corrupt people, but in the process, a lot of everyday Americans were going to pay the price. And in this final scene you see him wrestling with this:

Baum wanted to see the banks pay for their actions. But in the end, the banks got a lifeline from the government. Baum laments that the banks must have known this would happen, and in the end, the people who end up suffering are ‘poor people and immigrants’. In Baum’s rush to make the banks ‘feel the pain’, he never anticipated that the pain might simply be deflected to the American public.

The problem with being a devout conspiracy theory skeptic is this: If you ever find proof of one conspiracy theory, you suddenly ask yourself ‘If I was wrong about this conspiracy theory, what others have I been wrong about?’

The Big Short details, in excruciating detail, how banks, governments, hedge and bond managers all conspired to commit fraud, on a historic level. It breaks down in minute detail the actual conspiracy, then puts the cherry on top: No one was held accountable. In fact, the banks got a bailout from the American people. Corrupt people were literally paid by American taxpayers to destroy the housing market, and the wealth of the average American, in the process.

As someone who has learned to appreciate a good conspiracy theory I now have to wonder: If this was the type of corruption happening in this country in 2008, what type is happening in 2025? And if this is what they are willing to make movies about, what type of corruption are they still hiding from us?

I guess that’s a rabbit hole for another day.

I hope you enjoyed this edition of Marketing and Movies. Next month will feature one of my favorite movies, Memento. It will also be the first of three straight entries from the legendary director Christopher Nolan.

That’s in May. I hope you have a wonderful Tuesday, and thanks so much for reading!

Mack

---

Backstage Pass teaches you how to better connect with your customers, readers, clients, or donors. The lessons shared here draw on my experience over the last 20 years building customer engagement strategies for companies like Adobe, Dell, Club Med, Ingersoll-Rand, and countless others. I give you real-world research, examples and tactics that show you how to create customer engagement efforts that drive real business growth.