Crypto is finally getting its close‑up. Earlier this month, Netflix revealed that production has started on “One Attempt Remaining,” a romantic comedy built around cryptocurrency. For an industry that has dominated headlines, shaken global markets, and minted and erased fortunes, it’s remarkable how long it’s taken for a major studio to center a mainstream movie on crypto rather than treating it as a throwaway detail.
Until now, digital assets have mostly hovered at the fringes of cinema. They’ve appeared in low‑budget indie projects, straight‑to‑video thrillers, or as background props in futuristic settings where “paying in crypto” is shorthand for “this is the near future.” In most big releases, if crypto is there at all, it’s a line of dialogue or a blinking screen rather than a core narrative engine.
Director Cutter Hoderine, who made the indie crypto heist thriller “Cold Wallet,” believes those portrayals lag far behind reality. On screen, he argues, digital assets are still coded as niche and underground, even as governments experiment with digital currencies and traditional finance treats Bitcoin as a macro indicator on par with major stock indices. In the real world, crypto has become too intertwined with regulation, Wall Street, and geopolitics to credibly remain just a hacker’s toy.
Part of the disconnect comes down to basic comprehension. For years, crypto sounded opaque and intimidating to most viewers. Leo Matchett, CEO of Web3‑focused film fund Decentralized Pictures, compares the situation to the early days of the internet in popular culture. Films from the late 1990s and early 2000s barely touched online life, he notes. Only after the web became inseparable from everyday existence did movies begin to tell stories about hackers, chatrooms, online fraud, and digital identity.
Crypto, he argues, is on a similar cultural delay. Only a small slice of the public uses digital assets daily. Outside of trading apps and speculative investing, there are still relatively few universal, tangible use cases that audiences recognize as part of normal life. That narrow familiarity limits how naturally writers can weave crypto into character motivations, conflicts, and emotional stakes. Since cinema tends to mirror what people already know, technology that hasn’t yet fully sunk into daily habits struggles to become a believable centerpiece.
In “Cold Wallet,” for instance, crypto is primarily a mechanism rather than a theme. Hoderine describes it as simply the way value moves through the story. Matchett likens it to the gold bars in “Die Hard: With a Vengeance”: the treasure could, in theory, be anything. What matters to the plot is that it is scarce, valuable, and stealable. Crypto serves here as a modernized “container of value,” not as something whose deeper technological or social implications are interrogated.
That approach also dictated how the filmmakers handled jargon. Wallets, seed phrases, and transaction mechanics can become dense very quickly, so the team stripped explanations down to basics. They framed the film as a straightforward heist‑thriller: a crypto CEO who has rug‑pulled his investors is hunted by the people he burned. Genre familiarity does the heavy lifting. The audience doesn’t need to understand consensus algorithms to follow greed, betrayal, and revenge.
However, the way crypto has shown up in film so far is not just limited—it’s often deeply negative. When it plays a role, it frequently does so as a tool of criminals. In movies like “Crypto” (2019) or “Money Plane” (2020), digital coins are tied to money laundering and shadowy networks. Even in big‑budget tentpoles such as “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning,” crypto appears in the context of a sordid arms‑deal sequence, complete with a cringeworthy visual of a phone “Decrypting Blockchain,” as though the entire ecosystem were a single lock to pick.
Even when crime isn’t front and center, crypto is usually associated with the worst kind of wealth signaling. In the 2023 film “The Quiet Maid,” partially financed through digital assets and NFTs, it is the arrogant rich family—those who decorate their walls with CryptoPunk images and dabble in tokens—who embody excess and moral vacancy. The underpaid housekeeper at the heart of the story is decidedly not the one celebrating JPEGs as status symbols. Recent mainstream action films have also turned “crypto bros” into shorthand villains, filling the niche once held by 1980s yuppies: loud, entitled, and ripe for a cinematic comeuppance.
For some creators, that negative framing is an understandable response to crypto culture’s own image. Viviane Ford, director of the web series “Crypto Castle,” argues that the community handed screenwriters easy targets. Meme coins with cartoon mascots, performative stunts like wrapping luxury cars in Doge branding, and bombastic online behavior crafted an exaggerated persona that begged to be mocked. Rather than softening the caricature, many enthusiasts leaned into it, amplifying the stereotype of the reckless, hyper‑online speculator.
Ford also points to the human fallout behind the memes. Market collapses, such as the implosions of FTX and Terra, vaporized savings across the world. To many viewers, crypto isn’t a neutral technology; it’s a painful reminder of lost money and broken promises. From this perspective, framing it as a form of high‑risk gambling dressed up with technological jargon does not feel unfair. It feels accurate. When you’re aiming at a broad audience, it’s far easier to write a story where crypto is the seductive casino than one where it’s a neutral plumbing layer for finance.
Given that crypto brands have spent heavily on sports sponsorships, stadium naming rights, and influencer partnerships, the near‑absence of explicit product placement in films is striking. “Cold Wallet” features a crypto wallet as a key prop, yet the team received no funding or placement fees from wallet providers. In another project, the short film “Límite,” the privacy coin Monero was used as a symbol of the protagonist’s untapped potential and inner power, but its presence came via a community‑funded proposal, not a conventional marketing deal.
According to Matchett, this scarcity of product placement stems from mismatched timelines and volatile economics. Film development is slow: from script to final release can take years. Crypto markets, by contrast, swing from euphoria to despair in months. Projects flush with cash during a bull run feel invincible and might flirt with big marketing dreams; by the time a movie is actually ready for branding discussions, those same companies may have vanished or slashed budgets after a bear market wipeout. It’s hard to build long‑term promotional strategies on top of such unstable ground.
This boom‑and‑bust rhythm also distorts how studios perceive risk. Traditional sponsors—car makers, beverage brands, tech giants—offer continuity and regulatory clarity. Crypto firms face shifting rules, frequent scandals, and headline‑grabbing bankruptcies. From a studio’s perspective, attaching a big tentpole film to a company that might be under investigation a year later is an unappealing gamble. Until the sector proves a more consistent track record, crypto logos will likely stay mostly off‑screen.
At the same time, the arrival of a Netflix crypto rom‑com hints at a turning point. Romantic comedies rely on relatability and emotional stakes; they seldom revolve around dark markets or shadowy crime syndicates. For a love story set in a crypto world to resonate, it has to treat digital assets as part of normal life: a job, a passion, a backdrop for human connection. That alone suggests a softening of the “crypto equals villainy” formula and an attempt to explore more nuanced, everyday angles.
There is a rich spectrum of crypto‑related narratives Hollywood has barely touched. Stories about cross‑border payments supporting families, artists using NFTs to break free from exploitative intermediaries, or communities pooling funds for collective projects could all translate into compelling character dramas. The complexity of blockchains can be abstracted, just as films about high finance or hacking simplify the nuts and bolts while foregrounding personal choices, stakes, and values.
Another underexplored space is how crypto collides with identity and belonging. Online communities built around tokens or NFT collections often function like fandoms or subcultures, complete with in‑jokes, rituals, and hierarchies. That ecosystem is fertile ground for comedies of manners, coming‑of‑age stories, or social satires that don’t simply punch down, but also grapple with the genuine sense of hope and experimentation that drew many people into the scene.
For filmmakers, crypto also opens up intriguing formal possibilities behind the camera. Decentralized funding models, tokenized revenue shares, and NFT‑based collectibles could change how niche projects finance themselves and engage audiences. A film whose budget was raised through a token sale might have a built‑in base of passionate promoters who feel invested—literally and emotionally—in its success. That meta‑story, where the way a film is made echoes its subject, could itself become material for documentaries or dramatized retellings.
Of course, more balanced portrayals will also depend on time and distance. As regulatory frameworks mature and some high‑profile legal cases conclude, the narrative may shift from raw scandal to historical examination. Just as films later revisited the dot‑com bubble or the 2008 financial crisis with a mix of critique, humor, and empathy, future movies might look back on early crypto mania as a pivotal, chaotic chapter in the digitization of value. Characters could be written not just as caricatured scammers or clueless speculators, but as flawed pioneers navigating a poorly understood frontier.
Education will be a crucial ingredient. Screenwriters and directors who take the time to understand at least the basics of how blockchains and tokens work will be better equipped to avoid laughable scenes that misrepresent the technology. Consultants from the tech and finance worlds already shape the portrayal of hacking, banking, and law enforcement in mainstream entertainment; a similar bridge between crypto experts and creatives could help remove the most egregious inaccuracies while still allowing for dramatic license.
In the end, crypto’s journey in film will mirror its journey in society. As long as most people encounter it primarily as a source of scams, market crashes, and obnoxious online behavior, that’s how it will be written: as a punchline or a threat. As more concrete, everyday use cases emerge—and as the industry either reforms or is reshaped by regulation—there will be more room for stories where digital assets are not the villain, but one element of a much more human tapestry.
“One Attempt Remaining” represents a first real test of whether audiences are ready to see crypto not just as a plot device for crime, but as the setting for messy relationships, awkward jokes, and heartfelt decisions. If it lands, it could encourage studios to greenlight bolder, more varied projects, from thrillers and dramas to intimate indie films. If it flops, Hollywood may retreat to its comfort zone of treating blockchains as mere hacker wallpaper or shorthand for greed.
Either way, the ice has been broken. Crypto has finally stepped out of the background terminal and into the center of the frame. What happens next will depend not only on filmmakers and financiers, but on how the industry itself chooses to evolve—and whether it can offer stories worth telling that go beyond the crash, the scam, and the meme.