Hollywood Discovers That Business Isn’t Always Bad

H ollywood is known for churning out films that depict business owners as nasty, brutish, and slimy. (Think of several James Bond villains and Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street). But over time business-oriented films have become more nuanced and delved into stories about start-up culture, technological breakthroughs, and the complicated ethics of navigating today’s business environment.

In a welcome change of pace, 2023 gave us a spate of films that went against old stereotypes and offered audiences valuable lessons on what it takes to build a business.

Here are six of them. The first five are already on streaming video, and the last is in theaters.

Air is the story of how underdog shoe company Nike landed Michael Jordan’s revolutionary endorsement of the “Air Jordan” shoe. The film stars Matt Damon as a Nike recruiter and Ben Affleck as Nike CEO Phil Knight. Both men were raised in solidly liberal Massachusetts and have backed only liberal candidates in their careers, but in this film, they’ve produced a celebration of American ingenuity and the power of visionary thinking and individual striving.

In Tetris, a software engineer becomes obsessed with the video game Tetris, which a Soviet programmer created in his spare time while employed at a state-owned behemoth. It follows the hero’s frantic efforts to secure the handheld video game’s licensing rights for Japan’s Nintendo — a race against another Western video-game company and also against corrupt Russian goons linked to the KGB. As a bonus, we get a great look at the ugliness of communism and Soviet central planning.

Dumb Money tells the story of how millions of small investors save a dying business, the GameStop video0game retail chain, from a stock-shorting squeeze. The script focuses on a stockbroker named Keith Gill whose $53,000 investment in GameStop rose to a value of more than $48 million during January 2021. By harnessing the power of an online community, Gill led a mini-financial revolution that thwarted the short sellers and saw several hobbyist investors make it rich.

In Flamin’ Hot, an immigrant janitor named Richard Montañez manages to convince food giant Frito Lay to create a new, spicy Cheetos flavor. The film shows the food industry’s dynamism, creativity, and ability to create new products while it showcases how immigration broadens American culture.

BlackBerry charts the rise of a tiny Canadian company to a 45 percent market share in mobile computing and then its descent downward after the arrival of Steve Jobs’s iPhone. The movie captures the ephemeral nature of a supposed “monopoly,” especially in tech. It shows how an entire business landscape can be changed by the failure of a market leader to adapt in the face of competition.

Ferrari is a biography of Enzo Ferrari, the famed race-car driver and automotive entrepreneur. Ferrari started his company boasting that the production of cars would “pay for the racing” he loved. But since he was selling fewer than 100 cars a year, he had to seek a new investor. He did this by winning a prestige race and allowing his business-partner wife to prowl the production line and enforce his rigorous standards. Ferrari’s view of racing cars was that “what is ultimately most useful also usually turns out to be the most beautiful.” The company’s success has borne out his view.

The Academy Award nominations for 2023 will be announced on January 23. Let’s hope that this year “woke” Hollywood makes a nod toward these worthy films. After all, as Craig Gillespie, the Australian director of Dumb Money, told the Los Angeles Times, “The outsider being able to have a huge success with an idea is very American.” In fact, it’s far more common than the tale of a Gordon Gekko, the corporate psychopath whom director Oliver Stone immortalized as an iconic villain in Wall Street.