10 Insane Movie Facts Nobody Believes
3. The Wolf Of Wall Street Was Financed With Stolen Money
Look up "irony" in the dictionary and you'll simply find a news article detailing that Martin Scorsese's epic, Oscar-nominated opus on material greed, The Wolf of Wall Street, was itself financed with ill-gotten funds.
In 2015, the film's production company Red Granite Pictures was implicated in the 1MDB scandal, revealing that producer Riza Aziz stole from the Malaysian 1Malaysia Development Berhad sovereign wealth fund in order to bankroll the movie's $100 million budget.
Effectively, The Wolf of Wall Street was used to launder money, resulting in Red Granite paying $60 million to the U.S. government to settle the matter, while the film's central figure, Jordan Belfort (played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film) sued the company for $300 million.
It's one of those stranger-than-fiction stories that's just too ridiculous not too be true, even though it absolutely sounds like something you'd expect to see in, well, a Scorsese crime movie.