Ever out of favor

The Hunger Games franchise has been sweeping the globe for years. It’s a huge box office draw with millions of tickets sold for each installment of the saga, so it’s not surprising to find plenty of copycat and parody videos up online.

But no one would have expected such a video to emerge from the country’s largest wealth management firm. Early last year, Morgan Stanley employees created a 10-minute video titled “Margin Games: Manager on Fire.” The video, which was ultimately shelved and never shown at a branch managers’ meeting as originally intended, was unearthed by InvestmentNews this February.

The video follows the basic plotline of the mega-popular movie as branch managers volunteer to kill each other for the approval of the “home office.” It features such bigwigs as head of investment products and services Andy Saperstein and head of field management Shelley O’Connor.

The fact that Morgan Stanley would spoof the cutthroat world of investment banking and joke about employees losing their jobs sparked backlash in the media about the firm’s culture. Even the New York Post, world-renowned classy newspaper, called the video “an embarrassment” and “in poor taste.”

Unfortunately, most media coverage does not even touch upon the most offensive aspect of the video: the acting is just abominable. One and a half stars.