After a wild week of action, you can’t broadcast most of the biggest Wall Street movies

It’s been a crazy week for the stock market, with amateur traders on Reddit’s subreddit r / WallStreetBets battling traditional investors. The past few days have been full of big swings in stocks like GameStop and AMC and an app-powered drama that has sparked a big debate about the nature of Wall Street as a whole.

But if you were hoping to kick back this weekend, relax and watch a classic business movie about shark-like investors and overconfident Wall Street executives, you’re probably out of luck. Almost all major finance films are not available for broadcast now in the United States (at least not at the time of publication of this article), thanks to the capricious nature of the streaming market, the increasingly fragmented studio libraries and licensing agreements Byzantines that regulate what you can transmit and where.

This week’s short stock drama has you looking forward to The Big Short? You won’t find it on Netflix, Hulu or HBO Max. Now you I can broadcast it with ads on Crackle, from all services. Paramount (which distributed the film) may save it for Paramount Plus, due out in March, but that won’t do any good this weekend. Instead, your only option is to buy or rent it – which, it seems, a lot of people are doing, since the film has reached third place on iTunes.

Perhaps the ups and downs of the stock market reminded him more of Martin Scorsese the wolf of Wall Street, narrating the rise and fall of investor Jordan Belfort. But the Paramount film cannot be found on any streaming platform. So unless you’re willing to shell out some money to buy or rent the movie (which, as The Big Short, is shooting at the rental stops), you also won’t like Leonardo DiCaprio’s bad words. The same applies to the 2000s Boiler room, which is also absent from any streaming service.

20th Century Fox’s Wall Street it is not – predictably – on Disney Plus for streaming, but it is also not available on Hulu or any other service. If you’re looking for a financial movie to watch this weekend, however, the sequel, Wall Street: money never sleeps, is on Amazon Prime. There are also Call Margin, which is being broadcast on Peacock (for now).

But the scarcity of classic Wall Street films is not a single problem. It’s something that streaming services have struggled with in recent years, as big players like Netflix and Hulu have been less comprehensive and streaming services have been more focused on building libraries of original content. There was a similar problem during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of viewers wanted to watch Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film Contagion were frustrated because the film was not available for broadcast anywhere.

The fact that iconic Wall Street films also miss the big moment around ambitious investors and short selling is indicative of a bigger problem with streaming in 2021, which is likely to continue to get worse as more and more studios continue to claim their content your own services.

On the other hand, it is almost appropriate that the only way to assist the wolf of Wall Street or The Big Short this weekend is to return a little more money to the big financial machine.