Rewriting a Charles Randolph script already commissioned by Brad Pitt’s company, Plan B (Pitt has a cameo as the film’s quasi-counterculture conscience), McKay turns Lewis’s dense source into a blackly catastrophic comedy, a story of greed, venality, incompetence and barefaced corruption in which the good guys are the renegades who see disaster coming and stake their shirts on the apocalypse. It now transpires that McKay, a Saturday Night Live graduate who is no stranger to political satire, viewed The Other Guys as a slapstick allegory for the recent financial crisis and was working on the movie when he first read Michael Lewis’s nonfiction book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, an account of the people who predicted (and profited from) the crash of 2007-8. One of the strangest elements of Anchorman director Adam McKay’s goofy 2010 comedy The Other Guys was the inclusion of some credit sequence infographics about corporate fraud and capitalist corruption that seemed to have been crowbarred in from another movie. Unlike the slick suits and killer sheen of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, this is a world of chaos and disorder

Watch the big short online