Movies like The Wolf of Wall Street

Why it's similar — Barry Levinson's Bernie Madoff feature lands four years after Wolf and operates as the more sober adult version of the same story: an investor-celebrity fraud that lasted years past the point where it should have collapsed, eventually consumed the family around the perpetrator, and ended in a federal case that was never going to recover the money. The Madoff biopic is Wolf without the cocaine soundtrack.

Why it's similar — James Dearden's Nick Leeson dramatisation pairs the rookie-broker arc with the same financial-meltdown architecture Scorsese uses for Stratton Oakmont's late years. Leeson took down Barings Bank single-handed where Belfort took down himself, but the film's portrait of the young man-on-a-trading-floor who has decided the rules are negotiable is the closest pre-Wolf antecedent in the subgenre.

Why it's similar — Oliver Stone's original is the literal cinematic ancestor — the film whose 'greed is good' sermon is the cultural pre-text for Mark Hanna's Top of the Sixes lecture. Belfort has said in interviews that he watched Wall Street the year it came out and recognised Gordon Gekko as a model. The films are in direct conversation.

Why it's similar — Scorsese's own earlier feature shares Wolf's structural DNA almost exactly: a rise-and-fall biographical arc, a voice-over delivered direct to camera, a fortune built on a regulated industry's loopholes, a wife whose addictions corrode the marriage in parallel to the protagonist's legal problems, and a closing sequence that asks the audience to reckon with the cost of having enjoyed the rise.

Why it's similar — Todd Phillips's Miami arms-dealer caper imports the Wolf rhythm wholesale — narrator-as-pitchman voice-over, two-kids-from-the-same-neighbourhood ascendance, escalating fraud arc, federal indictment endpoint — and replaces Stratton Oakmont with the Pentagon procurement office. Jonah Hill is again in the friend-who-implodes seat, and the film reads as Wolf's procedural-cousin.