A year after premiering at the SXSW film festival, former O.C. heartthrob Ben McKenzie has finally found a distributor for his crypto exposé, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money. Like a character who wandered out of a teen drama and into a Senate hearing, McKenzie has spent the past few years reinventing himself as one of Hollywood’s most persistent crypto skeptics. Now, with indie outfit Forge backing the release, his film arrives with the benefit of hindsight and the burden of having to explain a financial fever dream that already broke.

Inside the Bitcoin hype and crash

The silver screen has a long history of transforming financial ruin into high-stakes drama, but McKenzie’s documentary skips the metaphors for a direct interrogation. It arrives at a curious moment for the Spanish market, where the fervor of the “cripto-burbuja” has cooled into a cautious, yet persistent, reality.

“Cryptocurrency. It’s pretty stupid,” McKenzie says bluntly in the trailer, before the footage accelerates into a collage of US Senate testimony, influencer clips, celebrity endorsements, and the now-familiar faces of fallen crypto titans.

It is not subtle. But it is effective.

Stylistically, the trailer leans into a kinetic, almost satirical rhythm. Quick cuts of hype videos and talking heads are juxtaposed with clips of ordinary investors and congressional hearings, creating a tonal whiplash that mirrors the boom-and-bust cycle it documents. McKenzie positions himself not as a detached narrator, but as a guide moving through the wreckage, equal parts incredulous and prosecutorial.

The structure feels closer to a first-person essay than a traditional investigative documentary, an approach that traces back to the source material: his 2023 book, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, co-written with journalist Jacob Silverman.

Yet, the trailer’s most telling moment comes when actor Gerard Butler says, “I made a ton of money on it. But I don’t actually know anything about it.”

It lands as both confession and thesis statement. In a single line, Butler captures the speculative logic that powered the entire crypto boom: profit first, understanding optional.

FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried and the crypto collapse

McKenzie builds the film around that disconnect. The trailer foregrounds the personalities who turned crypto into a cultural and political force, most notably Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX and Alex Mashinsky. These are not presented as isolated bad actors but as emblematic figures in a system that rewarded opacity, aggressive marketing, and political access. At one point, McKenzie is shown questioning Bankman-Fried about political donations, a reminder of how deeply the industry embedded itself in Washington and the US elections.

Celebrity endorsements and the Bitcoin boom

The trailer also gestures toward a broader ecosystem of influence. Celebrity endorsements from figures like Tom Brady, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Matt Damon helped normalize crypto for mainstream audiences, with Damon’s widely mocked crypto.com ad becoming a lasting artifact of the era. McKenzie’s argument is simple: the industry sold belief as certainty, and celebrity helped close the sale.

Even though McKenzie’s thesis is clear—where crypto is a speculative mania with real-world consequences, a system where assets are untethered from intrinsic value and where late-stage investors often end up holding the losses—the film, at least based on the trailer, appears more limited is in scope.

Why crypto still matters in Spain

But first, why should viewers in Spain care about a story that is, at least on its surface, so rooted in the United States? Because Spain is not on the sidelines of this trend. By most estimates, it ranks among the top countries in Europe for crypto adoption, with millions of users holding or trading digital assets. Younger investors, in particular, have been drawn in by the same forces the documentary critiques: social media hype, promises of financial independence, and the normalization of crypto through mainstream culture.

In that sense, the film’s US-centric scandals feel less distant than they might appear. The mechanisms are the same. The psychology is the same. At the same time, crypto is not a monolith, and the documentary seems less interested in exploring its more complex edges.

Is crypto just speculation or the future of finance?

There is an ongoing, quieter conversation within finance and technology circles about how blockchain infrastructure could reshape parts of the financial system. Influencers like Chris Burniske and Balaji Srinivasan often argue that while speculative tokens may be volatile, the underlying rails, distributed ledgers, programmable money, are already influencing payments, settlement systems, and digital ownership.

That perspective barely registers in the trailer, suggesting the film is less a comprehensive study than a focused critique, capturing the emotional arc of the crypto era with precision: the euphoria, the evangelism, and the eventual collapse. It shows how quickly a narrative of financial liberation turned into one of loss and disillusionment.

Whether the full documentary moves beyond that surface remains to be seen. Early impressions suggest it may only scratch at the deeper philosophical and technological questions underpinning crypto. But for audiences trying to understand how the mania took hold in the first place, that surface may be exactly where the story is most legible.

Still, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money serves as an accessible window into a complicated subject, carried by the perspective of a celebrity onlooker.

With Forge now attached, the film is poised for a wider release, though international timelines remain unclear. In Spain, it may take time before it surfaces beyond the festival circuit, likely landing first on a streaming platform.

If anything, the documentary plays as a cautionary tale about how investors approach crypto at moments of peak hype. But it is unlikely to be the final word. If recent trends are any indication, interest in crypto is not waning any time soon.