When investment bank Lehman Brothers imploded in 2008 and became an opening act in a global economic clusterfudge of truly epic proportions, Lehman headquarters must have been absolutely fraught with drama, including stuff like rampart scapegoating, merciless backstabbing, and general horror. The upcoming drama Margin Call is inspired by the bankruptcy of Lehman Brother, taking place at an investment bank in a single 24 hour period during which a whole lot of people are presumably thrown under the bus. In the case of Lehman, that bus was not a bus, but a debt of over $700 billion. A new poster for Margin Call gets across the financial goings-on while wisely showcasing the tremendous cast, including Kevin Spacey, Zachary Quinto, Demi Moore, Mary McDonnell, Paul Bettany, Aasif Mandvi, Simon Baker, and Penn Badgely.
This poster sports a new tagline for the film, reading, "Be First. Be Smarter. Or Cheat." This is considerably more precise than the previous tagline, "Something Big is Going Down." While I nonetheless enjoyed the first's simplicity, the new one definitely gets across the tone of the film and apparent ethos of high finance quite succinctly.
The film is written and directed by J.C. Chandor, making his feature directorial debut with some ambitiously complex subject matter. It looks like he'll navigate the complexity by focusing on the more human elements involved in discovering a financial blowout of this magnitude. Check the trailer, which was released back in July:
Margin Call is set to hit theaters on October 21st.
