Will the Producers of Female-Driven Wall Street Movie Equity Make Bank?
“No Wall Street movie has ever had a bad box office,” Sarah Megan Thomas, the producer and star of indie thriller Equity, says. “If we do a good job, it means we make money.”
Thomas did the profit-margin research. She and her producing partner and co-star Alysia Reiner (Orange Is the New Black) are hedging their bets on the film’s financial success, which in the indie world could simply mean recouping the film’s budget. But there are other factors to consider that still make Equity a risk.
It’s a tense Wall Street thriller, and tense Wall Street thrillers are difficult to pull off on an indie budget; authentically re-creating the imposing decor of flashy conference rooms and the high-powered people who work in them takes either cash or ingenuity. Luckily, Thomas and Reiner nabbed production designer Diane Lederman, who worked on Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010). But the film’s risks transcend its aesthetics; lurking in every scene, in every unsaid word and every downed cocktail, Equity sneaks something so groundbreaking into the story, without ever referencing it, that you have to wonder why this particular angle hasn’t been done before: From the auxiliary characters of doctors and lawyers to the three big stars, women are everywhere.
If the magnitude of this doesn’t quite set in, imagine you’re watching Wall Street, but Michael Douglas is a badass Anna Gunn (Breaking Bad) grooming a female Martin Sheen (Thomas) and being threatened by a lady U.S. Attorney (Reiner), who also happens to be married to a woman (Tracie Thoms).
