The Big Short is a film about the 2008 financial crisis. Specifically: focused on the investors who decided to short the housing market in 2007, when they noticed what was to come.

This review will be bare-bones for a while and possibly a bit messy…because I’m currently focusing on a few other things.

Anyway, the film is very good to put it lightly. However, some things to keep in mind if you haven’t seen it (or you have): the film presents itself as a mostly accurate adaptation of events…but…yeah, not really.
But not in the way you might expect.
The film is more like a fictionalized retelling of events that did actually happen, which is exaggerated for the sake of entertainment or to get the situation across better. It’s a very unusual approach to making a historical film…though I do quite like it…I’d just prefer they made that explicit.

So, to elaborate: the people you see in the film are based on real people…but the names have been changed and their personalities are sometimes quite different. Some entities (like Deutsche Bank) obviously existed, while others (like Scion Capital) didn’t.
And the epilogue text is probably not accurate either. Oh, and the ‘bespoke tranche opportunity’ warning was likely just an over-reaction, though an understandable one.

Some of the explanations are also a little more difficult to understand than others. The Margot Robbie scene is probably the best explanation…and it’s great for other reasons too. I’ll be honest, gentlemen, I like a girl who tells me to “fuck off”.
I think that the scene with Richard Thaler and Selena Gomez was the worst of the explanatory scenes. Just because it was a little hard to follow (though not for me!).^A)

The film is also a bit activist-y in tone, though it’s understandable why.

• TMDB
• Wall Street Lies! – A video by Patrick Boyle which is about multiple finance-related films, including The Big Short.
• Investment Analyst Explains: The Big Short – A video about The Big Short by The Plain Bagel. It does make a few mistakes, as far as I remember, but it’s mostly good.