'WeWork: Or The Making And Breaking Of A $47 Billion Unicorn' Trailer: Hulu Doc Relives The Whole Catastrophe
How much of a scandal could a company that rents desks really create? The rise and fall of WeWork was more of an amusingly bad business story than an example of dangerous fraud, but the new Hulu documentary WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn asks if that's all there was to it. Watch the WeWork documentary trailer below.
WeWork Documentary Trailer
Hulu has released a new trailer for its upcoming documentary chronicling the rise and fall of WeWork, which made its world premiere at SXSW this week ahead of an April streaming debut.
Directed by Jed Rothstein, WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn explores "the rise and fall of one of the biggest corporate flameouts and venture capitalist bubbles in recent years – this is the story of WeWork and its hippie-messianic leader Adam Neumann who makes you beg the question, was he trying to create a cult?"
The trailer focuses on WeWork's founder Adam Neumann and how he managed to convince everyone, including Japanese conglomerate SoftBank which invested $4 billion, that WeWork was going to change the world. His former employees are among the interviewees in the film, which also highlights how Neumann grew increasingly erratic over time, and how that all culminated in the infamous implosion of the company that ended in bankruptcy and suddenly shut-down offices.
As someone not familiar with the intricacies of the story, all the revelations in the trailer are new to me. The idea that Neumann cultivated an almost cult-like following and that mass expenditures and partying culture led to this extremely lucrative company going bankrupt overnight is all very fascinating. As is the beleaguered attitude of the talking heads, one of which exclaims in the trailer, "For God's sake, they're renting fucking desks."
/Film's Jacob Hall saw the documentary at SXSW and was similarly unfamiliar with the story, but said on Twitter:
Hulu's WEWORK documentary is a thorough rundown of that whole debacle, presented with just enough style and humor. As someone who didn't follow that story at all as it was happening, I found it informative and entertaining. #SXSW
— Jacob Hall (@JacobSHall) March 17, 2021
The WeWork documentary feels to me like something very much in the vein of Netflix and Hulu's competing Fyre Fest documentaries — a look at the schadenfreude of start-ups so that regular people at us can laugh at rich people's mistakes. Which I'm not complaining about. And it's apparently great story fodder — the WeWork disaster is also serving as inspiration for a scripted TV drama, WeCrashed, which will star Jared Leto.
WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn premieres on Hulu on April 2, 2021.