Hulu's 'WeWork' documentary isn't a disaster, and that's the problem | SXSW review

WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn is a step by step telling of how Adam Neumann founded a company so big it was bound to fail

While the rise and fall of WeWork is an interesting enough fable to fuel Hulu’s WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn for some time, it’s not a spectacular enough disaster to be anything more than a rundown of facts.

WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn is just one of the many films attempting to chronicle the age-old story of humans and their misguided belief that they’re too big and too important to fail. Most notably, Netflix and Hulu’s dueling Fyre Festival documentaries — Fyre and Fyre Fraud, respectively — offered two different approaches to telling the tale of overinflated ego and the gloriously entertaining burst that follows.

Netflix’s Fyre approaches the subject almost as a true-crime documentary by giving us the breadcrumbs — with a suspenseful atmosphere — that eventually led to disaster. On the other hand, Hulu’s Fyre Fraud was a satirical comedy of errors that took a social media angle to the Fyre disaster. Both have their merits — though Netflix’s film is more successful — because their angle on the subject is clear. WeWork, on the other hand, tries to piece together the best of both approaches but ends up feeling less than the sum of its parts.

Just like the title tells us, the movie begins with the making of WeWork. It gives us the background of New York City’s cutthroat real estate market, founder Adam Neumann’s early years in the US after immigrating from Israel, and how the idea of a futuristic coworking space would come to life. We follow the early development years that those of us that have worked in a startup knows all too well — long hours, impossible deadlines, and stretch resources. But the team did it.

However, the one thing missing from the narrative is Chekov’s gun, a narrative concept that presupposes that if a story element is introduced in the first act (ex. A pistol hanging on the wall), then it has to come into play in the second act (ex. Firing the pistol). WeWork doesn’t tell us exactly what is going to lead to the downfall. If anything, it does a lot of work to tell us why WeWork *will* work instead of why it won’t.

There are perhaps flashes of it. A throughline in the first half is Neumann’s pushback at the categorization of a real estate company. “It’s a community,” he’d reply. Another bit of foreshadowing involves Neumann’s wife Rebekah, Gwyneth Paltrow’s cousin — a fact she points out frequently as one former employee notes, and her surprising amount of control over the business. However, neither thread payoff.

WeWork’s flaw that it devotes precisely the wrong amount of time to both the “making” and “breaking” of the business without intermingling the two. What made the Fyre or even something like The Social Network so compelling is they give you the signs that point to the imminent failure. Instead, WeWork does exactly what Neumann does: sell us the vision.

However, when the movie moves to the downfall of why his vision doesn’t work, it feels like it’s telling us rather than showing. And because of that, it’s never as entertaining or biting as your want it to be. Perhaps it’s because the story of WeWork isn’t as much of a spectacular disaster as the Fyre festival and Neumann isn’t as intriguing of a figure as Billy McFarland or Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos fame.

For those not familiar with WeWork’s downfall, the documentary is a more than serviceable Wikipedia entry to catch you up. However, if you followed the news, the WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn doesn’t add as much color to the story as one might have hoped. If you already knew that WeWork was a highly expensive train barrelling towards an unfinished bridge, then you already know the story.

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Hey! I’m Karl. You can find me on Twitter here. I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic.

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Karl Delossantos

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Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.