Ben McKenzie has spent the last few years moving from actor to one of crypto’s most visible public skeptics, and now that campaign has become a feature documentary. “Everyone Is Lying to You for Money,” McKenzie’s directorial debut, will open in theaters on April 17 after The Forge acquired North American distribution and international sales rights earlier this month.
The film grows out of McKenzie’s 2023 book “Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud,” which he co-authored with Jacob Silverman, and follows him as he digs through the industry’s salesmanship, collapses, and scandals. The broad hook is straightforward: what was marketed as financial liberation became a culture of hype, misinformation, speculation, and fraud, with ordinary people left holding the bag when the thing cracked.
McKenzie isn’t a total luddite or newb to this topic. Holding a degree in economics, his pitch for the movie is blunt enough to set the tone all by itself: “Cryptocurrency. It’s pretty stupid.” From there, the documentary leans on reporting, interviews, and a personal-investigation framework, with appearances that include Morena Baccarin, Sam Bankman-Fried, Alex Mashinsky, Nayib Bukele, and Gerard Butler. That gives the project a lane somewhere between watchdog doc, media critique, and exasperated first-person essay about an industry that sold belief as certainty.
This is not some out-of-nowhere issue doc, either. The movie premiered at SXSW London in 2025. It later screened at Mill Valley and DOC NYC, where it continued a festival run that positioned McKenzie’s anti-crypto reporting as the backbone of a feature-length investigation.
What gives the trailer some bite is that McKenzie is not approaching the material as a neutral tourist. He has already testified before the U.S. Senate on crypto. He has spent years arguing that the industry’s warning signs were ignored, dismissed, or buried under celebrity endorsements, boosterism, and the promise of easy wealth. The documentary looks built to push that argument to its ugliest conclusion.
“Everyone Is Lying to You for Money” will open in theaters on April 17, 2026. Watch the trailer below.
