Forget tech moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, let the wisdom of fictional movie characters Jerry Maguire and Charles Foster Kane inspire your startup journey
Cinema maintains a fascination with tales of entrepreneurship, where people strive to achieve success through their sheer enterprise and grit. Interest in these stories is now so great that we have witnessed a recent rising trend in the creation of “corporate biopics”, dramatised retellings of real-life businesses.
Arguably kickstarted by The Social Network in 2010, we’ve since seen many entries in the cinematic subgenre, including The Wolf of Wall Street, Joy, Steve Jobs, The Founder, Blackberry, Tetris, Air, and more recently The Beanie Bubble in 2023, just to name a few. While there is enjoyable intrigue to be found in these “based on a true story” origin tales, they are often dramatised and may contain inaccuracies of the actual events.
In contrast, there is a simpler joy in completely fictional stories about launching businesses, where we don’t have veracity to contend with but where lessons are still on hand for any budding business type. So let’s forget reality for a moment, here are five completely fictional movies about launching a business and what you can take away from them. Movie spoilers below.
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Ghostbusters
While the surface premise of starting a ghost-hunting business may not appeal to some, the 1984 movie Ghostbusters is a masterful love letter to the startup founding experience. The business’s three co-founders have spent years as academics in the public sector building up specialist subject knowledge and identified a niche problem in the private sector for which they are qualified to provide a solution. Each of the three founding Ghostbusters fills a clear role as the client manager, market expert and R&D specialist. They secure initial funding for their venture via the bank, obtain a suitable workspace and produce advertising content and memorable branding.