It took me nearly six months but I finally had a chance to watch The Big Short, the film based on the best-selling book by Michael Lewis that came out in late December 2015. The film, which was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and which won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, is about a small group of traders who foresaw and profited massively on the collapse of the housing and subprime credit market in 2007-08.
As I discussed here, The Big Short is written and directed by Adam McKay, who co-wrote Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and The Other Guys with Will Ferrell. In addition to being very funny, 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. McKay said that his work on The Other Guys led him to be “obsessed with the subject” of the financial crisis.
