YMMV / Too Big to Fail

• Harsher in Hindsight: A few characters in the movie spiraled down badly after the events shown here, which the movie seems to unintentionally foreshadow.
  • Erin Callan, Lehman Brothers' CFO, who in the film is said that "all of Wall Street thinks she is a joke", did not take her termination well. She spiraled down into depression, divorce and suicidal ideation, before moving to the Hamptons and reconnecting with an old high school classmate helped pull her out of it.
  • Paulson's comment about "not knowing whether he (Vikram Pandit) is running Citibank or if Citi is running him" becomes harsher when considering that a board revolt led to his ouster from Citibank.
  • Paulson's praising of JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is difficult to watch, considering the London Whale LIBOR trading scandal of 2012.
  • GE CEO Jeff Immelt complaining about how lack of credit is hurting his chances to run routine daily operations, and Paulson's comment on how the crisis is spreading to Main Street comes of harsher, due to the government needing to bail out two automobile makers GM and Chrysler because they too had become too big to fail.
  • Immelt's comments about Main Street suffering from the effects of the crisis also becomes harsher given that while the economy did recover after the crash, the jobs that were available never returned and causing Main Street's pay to enter a slump.
  • Paulson's staff lamenting how the banks got to dictate the terms of the bailout, and the government not really being able to do anything about gets much more harder to look at after the government failed to impose any real penalty on the banks aside from fines for causing the crisis.
  • The comments citing the political and public reaction become much harder to look at in the present.
    • Wilkerson's comment that bailing out AIG will send the country crazy gets a lot more difficult thanks to the rise of Occupy Wall Street.
    • Paulson openly says that any politician who votes to bail out Wall Street will not get re-elected. While that did not materialize in 2008, it becomes much harder to hear after the enormous surge of populism that occurred in the United States due to the crash.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: After the film was released, Ayad Akhtar, who plays Neel Kashkari, one of the men who delivers the Lecture as Exposition about the financial crisis, later wrote Junk: The Golden Age of Debt, a stage play about the period in the 1980s when debt was first "repackaged" as an asset, one of the root causes of the crisis of 2008.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • To the Lionsgate film Margin Call, which was a fictionalized version of what Lehman did, before the events of this movie began.
  • It also has a Spiritual Precursor (prequel) in the movie The Big Short, which was about an investor who anticipated this crisis in 2005 and made a killing off of it.
• Tear Jerker:
  • When Paulson tells his wife that Lehman is gone, and that he doesn't know what will happen. He later openly tells her about the fact that people could riot to get food if the financial system collapses in a hushed worried tone.
  • He later tells his staff that there is no punishment he can give to the banks without them potentially refusing TARP and making the crisis worse. It is clear that he understands that the whole mess is the fault of the banks, but he has no choice, but to let them dictate the terms.