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 focusing on cryptocurrency. Hitherto, crypto’s on-screen appearances have largely been confined to indie productions, direct-to-video crime capers, and the odd mention where it’s used in lieu of money to convey a bit of futuristic gloss.

“It still feels—at least in film depictions—more fringe than it is in reality,” Cutter Hoderine, director of indie crypto heist thriller “Cold Wallet,” told Decrypt. “Especially right now, with the government of the U.S. being so gung-ho on digital currencies for better or worse, and Wall Street using Bitcoin now as an actual S&P 500-esque indicator of things.”

Partly, that’s because “up until recently, people didn’t really understand it,” Leo Matchett, CEO of Web3 film fund Decentralized Pictures, told Decrypt. “If you look at films in the late 90s and early 2000s, they didn’t involve the internet so much,” he said, adding that, “When the internet became heavily integrated into society, you started seeing movies about hackers, online activity, and all that kind of stuff.”

Crypto is following a similar trajectory, he argued—but “even today, there aren’t so many mainstream use cases that are being used” in our day-to-day 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 isn’t a part of that, then it will stay out of the art as well.”

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

It functions as a “device of value” 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 the device of value in that film is gold bars.”

In order to explain concepts like crypto wallets and seed phrases to “Cold Wallet’s” mainstream audience, Matchett explained, “we tried to make it as simple as possible.” That also meant sticking to established genre conventions; the film is, ultimately, a heist movie/thriller, pitting a crypto CEO against the luckless bagholders he rug-pulled.

Crypto’s bad rap

That speaks to another aspect of how crypto has been depicted on screen to date: it’s generally been associated with crime. In the likes of 2019’s “Crypto,” and 2020’s “Money Plane,” it’s linked to money laundering and criminals. In “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning,” a shady deal to obtain a cyberweapon is conducted in crypto (in a laughable scene with a smartphone “Decrypting Blockchain,” no less).

Even when it’s not linked to criminal activity, crypto is generally portrayed in a negative light on-screen. In 2023’s “The Quiet Maid”—a film part-funded by crypto and NFTs—it’s the obnoxious wealthy family who hang CryptoPunks on the walls and dabble in 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,” Viviane Ford, director of web series “Crypto Castle,” told Decrypt. “What kind of culture makes something called Pepe and pumps it and then is proud of that? Or wraps a Lamborghini in Doge?”

Crypto fans “memeified themselves,” Ford argued. “They became the thing that everyone hates on the internet and then they went full force down that road,” she added. “They just kind of got the worst of the narrative.”

On top of that, she said, “Crypto lost a lot of money for a lot of people,” through market crashes caused by the collapses of FTX and Terra. “Crypto is gambling and it just tried to have a sexier version of how to frame it,” Ford said.

It’s striking, given crypto’s issues with on-screen representation, that there’s been very little in the way of product placement from crypto firms. “Cold Wallet” featured a crypto wallet, but “we didn’t get any buy-in or product placement dollars” for it, Matchett said. The short film “Límite,” meanwhile, featured Monero as a symbol of the protagonist’s “potential and his unrealized gifts,” after an on-chain proposal was approved by the cryptocurrency’s community.

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

“It’s so feast or famine,” he said. Crypto firms “need to use the bull market period to gather supplies, squirrel them away so you can survive the winter.” Films, meanwhile, take “years to make,” meaning that, “A company that’s around at the beginning of the development cycle may not be there towards the end.”

Changing views of crypto

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

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

“I wanted all the characters on screen to be likable,” she told Decrypt, “which is really hard when you’re portraying four crypto bros.”

“Originally this idea of the blockchain and decentralized power and cross-border payments without having to wait for banks was really at the forefront of why people were doing this,” she added. “But the things that catch on quick are dumb memes and a 13-year-old getting rich and then shutting down his account ’cos he doesn’t know what to do with it. And that is funny, if we’re going to be honest.”

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

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

Ultimately, Matchett said, crypto “will be a big part of the global economy over the next few decades. And then it’ll be all over heist and adventure films.”