Paramount Pictures announced yesterday that 'The Big Short,' a film based on the best-selling book by Michael Lewis about traders who foresaw and profited massively on the collapse of the housing and subprime credit market in 2007-08, will open nationwide on December 23. The cast includes stars Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, and Steve Carell, and the film is written and directed by Adam McKay, who co-wrote Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and The Other Guys with Will Ferrell.

As I wrote here back in March 2015, McKay's The Other Guys is one of the few movies I know of that features SEC investigators --and the subject of securities fraud -- as part of the plot. In an interview published yesterday by Yahoo! Movies, McKay says that his work on The Other Guys led him to be "obsessed with the subject" of the financial crisis. McKay's keen interest was also fueled by the fact that his father lost his home in the wake of the financial crisis. McKay says the financial crisis was "cataclysmic” and "it hasn’t ended. We’re still in the middle of those ripples and this giant asset bubble we’re in right now is still going on. [The Big Short] is not just some historical snapshot.”

Paramount also released the trailer for The Big Short yesterday, which looks terrific. Check it out below:

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