My Favourite Films Are About Financial Collapse—and They Teach More Than Most Business Schools

Ask most founders to list their favourite films and you’ll get a mix of productivity porn (The Social Network), tortured genius mythology (Steve Jobs), or the occasional Tarantino flick if they want to signal “creative but dangerous.” But if I’m being honest, my favourite films are all about catastrophe. Not explosions or dystopias—but corporate implosions, the kind you feel in your cap table. The slow, oxygen-depleting collapse of belief systems dressed up as balance sheets.

Let me explain.

Start with The Big Short. Technically, it’s about subprime mortgages. But really, it’s about the systemic hallucination that underpins modern finance. What made the film—and the book—so brilliant was not just its clear exposition of CDOs, CDSs, and synthetic leverage (although hats off to Michael Lewis for turning financial engineering into an airport bestseller). It’s that it captured something deeper: everyone was incentivized not to look too closely.

From real estate agents to bankers to rating agencies, the entire edifice depended on collective winking. A mortgage broker hands out loans to people with no income, no jobs, no assets, and the ratings agency still gives it a triple-A. Because the bonuses were good. Because the music was still playing. Because when things are going up, nobody wants to be the guy yelling “fire.”

This, of course, is not just about 2008. It’s about every boom. Every frothy funding round where the startup’s addressable market is $80 billion, its churn rate is “not disclosed,” and the CFO’s exit plan is “don’t ask questions.” The lesson is this: optimism scales. So does fraud. And often, the only difference between the two is how good your slide deck looks.

Which brings us to Barbarians at the Gate—the movie and the book, both essential viewing if you want to understand what happens when corporate ego meets free-flowing debt. It tells the story of the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, a tobacco-and-cookies conglomerate that became the stage for a boardroom battle of astonishing pettiness. CEO Ross Johnson wants to take the company private. So do the bankers. So do the raiders. Everyone wants to win. No one asks if the company actually deserves the $25 billion price tag.

The film is funny. Wildly so. But underneath the champagne and private jets is a parable about how business can lose the plot. When the goal shifts from building value to “winning the deal,” you get not capitalism—but spectacle. And what’s most astonishing is how familiar it all feels in today’s market. Replace RJR with any pre-IPO unicorn and the story holds: founders chasing ever-higher valuations, funds locked in vanity rounds, and VCs treating startups like trading cards.

Barbarians at the Gate is not just a history lesson. It’s a mirror.

Then there’s Margin Call—the most claustrophobic, clinical film about a financial meltdown ever made. No montages. No Vegas blackjack tables. Just fluorescent-lit offices, late-night revelations, and the creeping horror that your balance sheet is a lie. When Zachary Quinto’s character discovers the firm’s models are broken and the losses are existential, the reaction isn’t panic. It’s denial. Then strategy. Then containment. Not to fix the problem, but to offload it. Preferably before anyone else notices.

What Margin Call gets painfully, precisely right is not just the psychology of collapse—but the mechanics of corporate triage. The film opens with employees being pulled into rooms, handed envelopes, and walked out of the building under fluorescent lights and stone-faced HR handlers. There’s no outrage. Just stunned silence and a severance packet. I had a version of this myself. Slightly less dramatic, but no less hollow: a video call, a pre-written script, and a polite but non-negotiable package offer. You have X days to accept. Thank you for your service.

The lesson is clear: in business, people are assets until they’re liabilities. And the distance between the two can be one earnings call. Layoffs are rarely personal. But they are often brutal. What Margin Call shows with unnerving realism is that in times of stress, companies don’t pause to explain. They execute.

And the remaining staff? They go back to work. Because someone has to sell the bad paper before sunrise.

Why do I love these films? Because they expose the underlying fragility of conviction. Markets don’t run on truth. They run on trust. And trust is a performance. Founders, investors, analysts—we are all actors in a shared hallucination. The pitch deck is a screenplay. The term sheet is a prop. The valuation is a plot twist. And occasionally, someone backstage pulls the curtain, and we all realize the emperor wasn’t naked—he was selling unregulated mortgage derivatives.

These aren’t just films about finance. They are films about human nature. About ego, fear, greed, and inertia. About the way narratives override numbers, and how difficult it is to say “this doesn’t make sense” when everyone around you is getting rich pretending that it does.

And they are—quietly—about the few people who dare to question it. The short sellers. The whistleblowers. The risk analysts in the back room with too much integrity and not enough political savvy. The ones who saw the hole before the crash.

So yes, I love these films. Because they remind me that business is not a spreadsheet. It’s a story. And good founders know how to tell it—but great founders know when to question the ending.

Also, The Big Short made me laugh out loud with a scene involving synthetic CDOs and a cameo from Anthony Bourdain explaining tranching using fish stew. If that’s not art, I don’t know what is.