Crypto Goes to Hollywood – Decrypt

Earlier this month, Netflix announced that it had gone into production on “One Attempt Remaining,” a crypto-themed romantic comedy.

It’s perhaps surprising that it’s taken this long for a Hollywood studio to greenlight a mainstream feature film cryptocurrency. So far, crypto’s on-screen appearances have been largely limited to indie productions, direct-to-video crime capers, and the odd mention of it being used in place of money to convey a bit of futuristic sheen.

“It still feels — at least in cinematic representations — more marginal than it actually is,” said Cutter Hoderine, director of the indie crypto heist thriller “Cold Wallet.” Declutter. “Especially now, when the US government is so excited about digital currencies, for better or worse, and Wall Street is now using Bitcoin as a true S&P 500-like indicator of the situation.”

Partly that’s because “people didn’t really understand it until recently,” said Leo Matchett, CEO of Web3 film fund Decentralized Pictures. Declutter. “If you look at movies from the late 1990s and early 2000s, they didn’t have much to do with the Internet,” he said, adding, “As the Internet became very integrated into society, you started seeing movies about hackers, online activities and all that kind of stuff.”

Crypto is on a similar trajectory, he argued, but “even today there aren’t that many mainstream use cases” in our daily lives. That limits the scope of what you can do with crypto on screen, he said. “Films are a reflection of our daily lives, and as long as crypto is not part of that, it will remain outside of art.”

In the DCP-backed “Cold Wallet,” crypto is “just the payment method,” Hoderine explained.

It functions as a “value asset” in the film, Matchett added. “It could have been anything; if you look at ‘Die Hard: With a Vengeance,’ they break into the Federal Reserve and fill dump trucks with gold bars, and so gold bars are the instrument of value in that movie.”

For concepts like crypto wallets And seed sentences For the mainstream audience of “Cold Wallet,” Matchett explained, “we tried to make it as simple as possible.” That also meant adhering to established genre conventions; the film is ultimately a heist film/thriller, pitting a crypto CEO against the hapless bag holders he has attracted.

Crypto’s bad reputation

That speaks to another aspect of how crypto has been depicted on screen so far: it’s generally associated with crime. For example, in 2019’s ‘Crypto’ and 2020’s ‘Money Plane’ it is linked to money laundering and criminals. In ‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning’, a shady deal to obtain a cyber weapon is executed in crypto (in a laughable smartphone scene ‘Decrypting Blockchain’, no less).

Even if there is no connection to criminal activity, on-screen crypto is generally portrayed in a negative light. In 2023’s ‘The Quiet Maid’ – a film partly funded by crypto and NFTs – it’s the obnoxious rich family who hangs up CryptoPunks hanging on the walls and dealing with cryptocurrencies, rather than the titular underdog protagonist, while in mainstream action films like 2024’s “The Beekeeper” and 2025’s “Play Dirty,” “crypto bro” characters occupy a space akin to the yuppie antagonists of 1980s films.

“They did it to themselves,” says Viviane Ford, director of the web series “Crypto Castle” Declutter. “What culture makes something called Pepe and pumps it up and is proud of it? Or wraps a Lamborghini in Doge?”

Crypto fans were “memeifying themselves,” Ford argued. “They became something that everyone on the internet hates, and then they went full steam in that direction,” she added. “They just got the worst of the story.”

Furthermore, she said, “Crypto has lost a lot of money for a lot of people,” due to market crashes caused by the collapse of FTX and Terra. “Crypto is gambling and it was just trying to have a sexier version of how to frame it,” Ford said.

What’s striking, given crypto’s problems with on-screen display, is that there is very little product placement by crypto companies. “Cold Wallet” featured a crypto wallet, but “we didn’t get any buy-in or product placement dollars for it,” Matchett said. In the meantime, the short film “Límite” was shown Money as a symbol of the protagonist’s ‘potential and his unrealized gifts’, after a proposal to the chain was approved by the cryptocurrency community.

The lack of crypto product placement is partly due to crypto market cycles being out of sync with the movie development cycle, Matchett suggested.

“It’s feast or famine,” he said. Crypto companies “need to use the bull market period to accumulate stocks and squirrel them away so you can survive the winter.” Filmmaking, meanwhile, takes “years,” meaning that “a company at the beginning of the development cycle may not be around by the end.”

Changing views on crypto

There are signs that the tide is turning. Some productions are starting to explore the technology in more detail, with “One Attempt Remaining” actually using the workings of crypto wallets and seed phrases as a plot hook.

Ford’s own ‘Crypto Castle’, meanwhile, has a more nuanced view of the crypto community; she spent four years among crypto bros in the titular San Francisco house, turning her experiences first into a stand-up show and then into a web series.

“I wanted all the characters on screen to be likable,” she said Declutter“which is very difficult when you portray four crypto bros.”

“Originally, this idea of ​​the blockchain and decentralized power and cross-border payments without having to wait on banks was really the precursor to why people were doing this,” she added. “But the things that catch on quickly are stupid memes and a 13-year-old who gets rich and then closes his account because he doesn’t know what to do with it. And that’s funny, if we’re being honest.”

“There is certainly amazing potential” in crypto, Matchett said, adding that the film industry has yet to produce “success stories” showcasing the technology. “People don’t really understand it yet, and there’s not enough time in a movie to really dive into it unless it’s a documentary,” he said.

Ultimately, he argued, “some brilliant creative will find a really simple way to do it in a short period of time and then tie that story into a war of, you know, centralized versus decentralized.”

Ultimately, Matchett said, crypto “will be a huge part of the global economy in the coming decades. And it will only be about heists and adventure movies.”