The film follows three groups of characters tied to their respective short trades. While they are sometimes seen on screen together, the firms don't interact with each other directly.

Scion Capital and Associates
• Christian Bale as Michael Burry, one of the first people to discover the American housing market bubble. Burry operates his own hedge fund, Scion Capital, and uses his liquidity to short the housing market.
• Tracy Letts as Lawrence Fields, an investor in Burry's hedge fund, a fictional composite of Joel Greenblatt and others who had invested with Burry but came to disagree with his strategy.
• Jae Suh Park as Burry's wife.
The real Michael Burry made a cameo in the film as a Scion employee. At the beginning of the scene in which the fictional Burry's investors confront him at his office, he is briefly shown standing near the front door, talking on the phone.

FrontPoint Partners and Associates
• Steve Carell as Mark Baum, the leader of FrontPoint Partners, a small independent trading firm. Baum is in a state of constant disgust with the American banks. The character is based on Steve Eisman.
• Ryan Gosling as Jared Vennett, a salesman from Deutsche Bank who decides to sell Burry's credit default swaps for his own profit. The character of Vennett is based on Greg Lippmann.
• Hamish Linklater as Porter Collins
• Rafe Spall as Danny Moses
• Jeremy Strong as Vinny Daniel
• Marisa Tomei as Cynthia Baum, Mark Baum's wife.
• Adepero Oduye as Kathy Tao, an employee of Morgan Stanley, who oversees Baum's fund.
• Byron Mann as Wing Chau, a CDO manager whom Baum interviews in Las Vegas.
• Melissa Leo as Georgia Hale, an employee of Standard and Poor's based on Ernestine Warner, who admits to giving inaccurate ratings for bonds.
• Max Greenfield and Billy Magnussen as mortgage brokers taking advantage of people looking for homes.
Brownfield Fund
• John Magaro as Charlie Geller, one half of Brownfield Fund (based on Cornwall Capital), who discover Vennett's prospectus and also decide to short the housing market. The character is based on Charlie Ledley.
• Finn Wittrock as Jamie Shipley, Charlie's partner in Brownfield Fund. The character is based on James Mai.
• Brad Pitt as Ben Rickert, a retired former trader who helps Jamie and Charlie with their trades. The character is based on Ben Hockett.
• Karen Gillan appears as Evie, an employee of the SEC and Jamie's brother's ex-girlfriend, whom he meets with in Las Vegas.

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In 2013, Paramount acquired the rights to the 2010 non-fiction book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis, to develop it into a film, which Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment would produce. On March 24, 2014, Adam McKay was hired to write and direct a film about the housing and economic bubble. Screenwriter Charles Randolph, who co-wrote the film with McKay, said one of the first challenges was finding the right tone for the film. He told Creative Screenwriting, "In general it was trying to find the right tone that was slightly funnier than your average Miloš Forman comedy, which is all grounded character-based but not so satirical where you got Wag the Dog. Somewhere between there was what I was shooting for. Once I got the tone down, then I went through the plot. The market's movements provided you with an underlying plot. You make your short deal, then the bank is trying to squeeze you out, and then it all breaks loose. So that was pretty easy, and it provided character arcs against that." Two years after Randolph wrote his draft, McKay, as director, rewrote Randolph's screenplay. It was McKay's idea to include the celebrity cameos in the film to explain the financial concepts.
On January 13, 2015, Variety reported that Brad Pitt, Christian Bale, and Ryan Gosling were set to star in the film, with Pitt producing the film along with Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner. Plan B Entertainment would produce, with Paramount handling the distribution rights. Before this, Pitt had already starred in the adaptation of the author's Moneyball, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. On January 14, it was announced that Steve Carell would also star. On April 21, 2015, more cast was revealed by Deadline, including Melissa Leo, Marisa Tomei, Tracy Letts, Hamish Linklater, John Magaro, Byron Mann, Rafe Spall, Jeremy Strong, and Finn Wittrock. Charles Randolph wrote the initial draft. Max Greenfield joined the ensemble cast of the film on April 23, 2015. Karen Gillan tweeted about her involvement in the film on May 8, 2015. Jeffry Griffin, who plays Vennett's assistant Chris, was originally only planned to appear as an extra, and was cast to a speaking role after a production assistant picked him out of a crowd.
Principal photography on the film began on March 18, 2015, in New Orleans, Louisiana. On March 25, filming was taking place on General de Gaulle Boulevard in the Algiers section of New Orleans. On May 8, Gillan confirmed she was shooting her scenes. On May 20, 2015, filming took place on a short stretch of Mercer Street, between Prince Street and Spring Street, in Manhattan, New York City. On May 22, the production crew recreated the offices of failed investment firm Lehman Brothers in the lobby of the New York State Department of Financial Services in Manhattan. An assistant counsel for the Department of Financial Services played one of the extras in the scene.

On September 22, 2015, Paramount set the film for a limited release on December 11, 2015, and a wide release on December 23, 2015. The film was released on DVD and Blu-ray on March 15, 2016.