The 5 Best Movies and TV Shows About Finance

There’s plenty of good film and television about finance out there. However, I think there are a few that really stand out above the rest. It’s worth pointing out that my lest also skews toward more recent works, so I’ll include an honorable mentions sections below.

Best Finance Movies and TV

Billions (2016): An HBO show where a US attorney goes after a notorious hedge fund hedge fund manager. The fictional series is loosely based on the activities of Preet Bharara, the former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and his legal battles with hedge fund manager Steve Cohen of SAC Capital Advisors (now Point72 Asset Management).

The Big Short (2015): A biographical comedy-drama that follows a small group of financiers that were able to accurately predict the credit and housing bubble fore-running the 2007-08 financial crisis. Its based on the 2010 non-fiction book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, by Michael Lewis. The main protagonist of the film is Dr. Michael J. Burry, founder and CIO of Scion Capital started to focus on the US subprime housing market in 2005. His analysis lead him to short the market by persuading Goldman Sachs and other banks to sell him credit default swaps against the subprime deals he believed would default.

Margin Call (2011): An independent drama, thriller that follows key employees at an investment bank over a 24-hour period during the early stages of the 2007-08 financial crisis. An analyst discovers a massive sub-prime exposure risk on the bank’s books and the firm scrambles through the nigh to come up with a solution.

Barbarians at the Gate (1993): A biography, comedy-drama about the leveraged buyout (LBO) of RJR Nabisco for ~$25B by Henry Kravis, co-founder of KKR circa 1988. At the time, this was the biggest LBO is history and private equity was a relatively new industry back then. Needless to say, this deal garnered a lot of attention in the business world. The film is based on the book Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar.

Wall Street (1987): A crime, drama about a young stockbroker willing to do anything to make it on wall street, like trading on insider information to please the main antagonist of the film, corporate raider Gordon Gekko. Many consider this film the OG of finance movies, so it’s definitely worth checking out.