Movies about Business that are Actually Good
This past year, I have become OBSESSED with business scandals. Am I interested in business - absolutely not. I graduated from art school. I am interested in human psychology and good stories, and a juicy business scandal has all that and more.
It started here and there with a few podcasts and sitting in on shows my mom was watching. But it really blossomed when The Journal started posting their daily podcast about the SBF trials.
I was (and still am) at a job where I'm expected to wake up early and drive up to 100 miles to whatever location we're at for the day. Naturally, audiobooks and podcasts have become my friends. My mom had been going on about SBF and the cryptocurrency trials for a while. I ignored it. My experience with cyrpto had been bad. I didn't understand it, and whenever someone tried to explain it to me online, it usually somehow involved unsolicited dick pics and a quick report and block from me.
Out of boredom, I decided to listen to the ongoing court case against SBF and I was shocked. 9 billion dollars just vanished? Bribes to politicians all over the world? I always knew those crypto bros were insufferable, but this was insane.
In many ways, I discovered that running a successful business scandal is like running a cult. The psychology of the type of person who runs a business scandal is what really intrigues me. You have to convince your employees, investors, the public, and customers that you have a product worth buying. It requires a lot of work and start up capital to get the scam going. And then, you have to keep it all under wraps, which takes even more work, and usually, even more money. And it spirals into this self-feeding loop until - something slips out and you're busted.
I am eagerly awaiting whichever filmmaker decides to take on the SBF mini-series. As far as I know nothing has been announced, but we all know it's coming sooner or later. While that cooks, I wanted to share some of my favorite movies and shows about business that are actually good. (Aka - not boring)
The Dropout is phenomenal. There's just no other way to put it. Amanda Seyfried plays Elizabeth Holmes. (Daughter of a former Vice President of Enron, which was another massive business scandal). Her acting is powerful, raw, and completely focused.
For those who don't know, Theranos was an apple-like company that claimed they had a machine that could run hundreds of medical tests with just one drop of blood. Except... they couldn't. The tests were completely false, and they knowingly gave people wrong diagnosis. Eventually Elizabeth and her business partner Sunny were found out, and put on trial.
The Dropout follows Elizabeth as she starts the company, faces obstacles, decides to forge her machine, and completely change her identity. That is what I love most about the dropout - we see Elizabeth go from a well-meaning college student to a cold faced automaton. Amanda Seyfried captures this transformation perfectly.
The cast includes Naveen Andrews, Stephen Fry, and Alan Ruck among others. To me, Theranos is the epitome of the venture-capitalism trend that defined my formative years. Big promises, flashy images and advertising, with no substance behind it. The Dropout sees that and plays it beautifully.
What happens when an American man pitches a Soviet video game to a Japanese tech company? A mad race against time to secure the licensing rights, of course. On the surface this may seem boring - copyright law is hardly thrilling. But Nintendo as we know it wouldn't be what it is without Tetris. Simple, wonderful, Tetris.
Tetris follows Henk Rogers, an ambitious man with a start-up company. At a convention he discovers a game called Tetris, and buys the rights to distribute the game in Japan from a company called Mirrorsoft. Things seem to be going well, until he gets a call that the arcade rights had been promised to SEGA. Thus begins the central theme of Tetris - Mirrorsoft promises Henk one thing, then reneges when they realize it will cut into their profits.
Henk is sent to Seattle and shown a brand new innovation in video game consoles - the Gameboy. The promise is huge - millions of dollars. Henk convinces Nintendo to package the gameboy with Tetris instead of Super Mario Land, but now the race is on, with both capitalists and communists against him.
The movie does a good job at explaining the complexities of copyright law without getting bogged down. There are action scenes, friendships, and a good villain to root against. I never realized a game seemingly as boring as Tetris had such a rich history - it was literally almost locked up by the Soviet Union.
For those who don't know, Dumb Money focuses on a scandal that took place in 2020. Keith Gill noticed that Game Stop stock was undervalued, and more lucratively, many high profile hedge funds were shorting it. Keith regularly streamed about his opinions on stocks, and young people took notice. Soon the stock skyrocketed in value, leaving hedgefund manager Gabe Plotkin and Robinhood CEOs in the lurch - they had invested heavily on the idea that Game Stop would fail - a strategy called "Getting Dumb Money"
What makes Dumb Money, and the whole Game Stop/Robinhood scandal interesting are two things - Number One: Robinhood CEOs blocked users from be able to sell their stocks at the height of the frenzy, which is illegal. Number Two: Hedge Managers assume that young people are dumb and use shady tactics to grow their own wallets. But young people are interested in finance, and the Game Stop scandal exposed how severe the gap is between classes - so much so that Congress stepped in and had hearings on whether Gabe and Robinhood were breaking the law.
It was a solid movie, that showed all aspects and situations of life that everyday Americans go through. It captured a time very well, and that was the height of the pandemic, where the rich got richer and we all slaved away at our "Frontline essential jobs".
Quiz Show is a scandal on two fronts - money, and television. It's the late 50s, and NBC is running a successful game show called Twenty-One. Herb Stemple is the reigning champion, and he expects a good future in television. However, NBC fears his ratings are stagnating, and bring Charles Van Doren on for competition.
Van Doren had originally auditioned for an easier game show, but was convinced to join Twenty-One. On his first show, he is given a question that he already answered in his audition. These questions are supposedly sealed in a bank vault before the show starts so that no one can lay eyes on them. Van Doren caves and answers the question correctly.
Meanwhile, Herb is promised a jump start on his career in television if he keeps quiet and lets Van Doren win the show. But a few weeks pass and nothing happens, so he solicits the help of a lawyer.
Quiz Show is a little bit different from the other movies on the list, mostly because I wanted to suggest smaller or lesser known films. Almost every list out there about business movies puts The Wolf of Wallstreet, The Big Short, and The Informant. Quiz Show has a great cast, with Ralph Fiennes and John Turturro as the leads.
All The Queen's Horses and The Quarter Horse Queen are, in my opinion, a perfect unofficial pair. They tell the story of Rita Crundwell, a comptroller who pulled off the biggest municipal fraud case in U.S History - getting away with $53 million dollars over the course of 22 years. What did she do with all that money? She bred and showed Quarter Horses, of course. (And bought a few million dollars of luxury items for herself, naturally)
All The Queen's Horses is a 2017 documentary about the scandal. It is more cut and dry than the podcast. It largely focuses on the money, how she embezzled it, and how the local auditor company in town was partially responsible for letting Rita get away with her scam.
Scamfluencers released a podcast in 2023 titled The Quarter Horse Queen. Their podcast is fantastic, more journalism-based, and benefits from the fun and spontaneity of hosts Scaachi and Sarah. They focus a little more on Rita's flashy lifestyle, which I wish the doc had done more. They are also able to provide updates on Rita, since in 2021 she was released from prison and placed into what is essentially house arrest.
I find the scandal fascinating, for many reasons. Rita did it completely alone, with no accomplices. She didn't live in a big town or really have any political knowledge or ambitions. And the scam was mind numbingly simple. Oh, and she had a horse named Pizazzy Lady, which just just begs the question - why?
Honorable Mentions
Quiz - A three part mini-series about the Charles Ingram scandal on Who Wants to be a Millionaire
WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Dollar Unicorn - This documentary is about the cult-like nature of WeWork, an overvalued real-estate company that dominated millennial office culture. They recently fired their CEO who took over after Alfred Neuman, founder of WeWork, was dethroned.
The Informant - This one gets mentioned on a lot of lists, but it is actually really good. It's about price fixing tactics at Archer Daniels Midland and the subsequent FBI investigation
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