With the Occupy movement coming to the fore last year, Wall Street features prominently as a hot topic for current filmmakers. The latest slate of movies to come out tend to focus on the recent financial collapse of 2008, but with a setting so ripe for dramatic storytelling, Hollywood has explored the inner workings of Wall Street many times before. Here are the top five Wall Street movies in no particular order.
The Classic Wall Street Movie – Wall Street
Cementing its place in film history with the phrase “Greed is good”, Wall Street explores the underhanded and corrupt side of trading. Gordon Gecko as played by Michael Douglas takes a young and eager protege, Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), under his wing and teaches him that ethics and scruples can be traded away for power as easily as stocks being traded on the floor. The temptation of fast money and easy success proves too hard to resist for a time, but when Bud’s own father is negatively impacted by the firm’s shady dealings, his perspective changes. To redeem himself he cooperates with the SEC’s investigation and is instrumental in taking down his mentor.
The Humorous Wall Street Movie – Trading Places
A successful commodities broker (Dan Ackroyd) and a homeless man (Eddie Murphy) switch places when they unwittingly become pawns in a careless bet between the owners of the brokerage firm. When the two men discover the hoax, they exact their revenge against the owners by supplying them with false insider information which leads to the loss of their fortune on a bad investment. Despite its age, this movie holds up as funny and surprisingly relevant. In fact “The Eddie Murphy Rule”, which dealt with insider trading as depicted in this film, was put into effect in some of the legislation that passed in 2010 under the Dodd-Frank bill.
The Young Person’s Wall Street Movie – Boiler Room
A young college dropout (Giovanni Rabisi) goes to work at a small brokerage firm to live up to his father’s expectations for him. He spends his days in the boiler room with a group of young and cocky traders making cold calls and finds that he is adept at selling which makes him a rich man in a very short time. To stay wildly successful, he must execute increasingly unsavory and illegal deals which eventually lead to an FBI raid.
The Horrifying Wall Street Movie – American Psycho
In this psychological thriller, the antihero of the story is Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) a young Wall Street banker by day and a psychopathic monster at night. His materialism, narcissism, and greed are not satiated by his work, so he takes out his frustrations with violent sprees of mayhem and murder. Though the subject matter is dark, there are comic moments scattered throughout making the film truly unsettling.
The Most Realistic Wall Street Movie – Margin Call
Though loosely based on events that transpired at Lehmen Brothers leading up to the financial crisis of 2008, this movie is a dramatization of the 24 hour period after executives at a fictional investment bank discover that risky mortgage-backed securities are going to destroy the firm. As the situation runs up the chain of command, the decision is made to dump all the risky inventory regardless of the impact on the investors or the economy at large. The psychology of Wall Street gets summed up with the CEO (Jeremy Irons)rationalizing the reckless strategy that leads to market crashes as merely a part of the normal cycle of gains and losses.
Aaron Fisher is a corporate accountant and guest author at Best Finance Schools, a site with guides and information to help prospective students review the top finance schools online.
You can easily buy all five of these films, as well as a plethora of other Wall Street-themed movies, through online stores. Though some may claim that the digital medium is becoming popular, there are still some undoubtedly benefits to owning a DVD. First and foremost, buyers don’t have to worry about their movie getting accidentally deleted. This format is also easier to carry around, meaning you don’t have to mess with any dongles or external hard drives if you want to bring any of the aforementioned films to a friend’s house.
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