WeCrashed, the fascinating limited drama about the meteoric rise of a $47 billion startup called WeWork, came to an epic end, chronicling the downfall of its eccentric co-founder, Adam Neumann (Jared Leto), and his ambitious wife, Rebekah (Anne Hathaway), in the series finale. While speaking to ET, creators and showrunners Lee Eisenberg and Drew Crevello broke down the final moments of the episode, “The One With All the Money,” and the story behind Katy Perry’s “Roar,” as heard throughout the series.
With mounting pressure to go public, Adam and Rebekah come up with a wildly fantastical S-1 filing that’s met with a disastrous reaction from inside and outside of the company. This leaves the couple fighting for their positions at the top of WeWork while the IPO at a drastically reduced valuation is postponed.
As a result, Adam and Rebekah are forced into crisis mode as the two become increasingly paranoid and erratic. That pushes Adam to make a last-ditch effort by reaching out to key investor and SoftBank CEO, Masayoshi Son (Eui-sung Kim), to make a financial power play with the company’s board of directors.
In the end, Adam is pushed out as CEO and is removed from the board but not without negotiating an exit package of nearly $1.7 billion, including an annual salary of $46 million for being retained as a consultant and the rights to Rebekah’s failed private school, WeGrow.
While the couple thinks they have come out on top, during their family vacation to the Dead Sea, Rebekah receives unsettling news from Masayoshi. “You will never get the buyout package. Not a single penny. I will make sure of it,” he tells her over the phone. “The next time we speak will be through lawyers.”
The series ends with a distraught Rebekah running out into the sea, splashing salt water into Adam’s eyes, as the two flail about in comical fashion while an orchestral version of Katy Perry’s “Roar” begins to play.
Reflecting on that scene, Crevello says there were two things that factored into how the series ended. “One is Rebekah, who grew up with wealth and who, at one point in the series, says, ‘Let’s just walk away from it. We don’t need any of this,’” he says. “But in that moment, when everything is threatened to be taken away from her, she actually understands for the first time, like, ‘Oh god. I’ve had money my whole life and now it’s the first time it’s being taken away.’”
And so during her reaction to Masayoshi’s threat, “you really see her understand that in a visceral way,” he says, adding that “there was also something -- there’s a lot of salt in the Dead Sea -- just sort of metaphorical. Them kind of yelling and blinded felt like a delicious metaphor at the very end of the story.”
While this was not the point of the series, Eisenberg says the finale felt like the end of a heist in some ways. “You never quite know who’s getting up on who. And so, it’s like, ‘Oh my god, Adam is leaving the company. He’s stepping aside and then Masa is going to do this.’ You don’t know who’s aligned with who and they’re all these kinds of machinations of that,” he explains.
And instead of ending on the couple getting the buyout, “we loved the coda and we felt like it was true,” Eisenberg continues. “They kind of absconded to Israel after all of this. And we wanted to explore that… We wanted it to be like, ‘They made it out and this is who we’re left with, these two characters, and everything is calm. And then Masa is coming in for this one final blow.’ And that just felt delicious to us.”
Not only that, but to end with “Roar” brought the series full circle. The song, which was heard in the beginning of the series as Adam walks into WeWork, was something that would happen in real life. “We read somewhere that when Adam would arrive at the office, it was the responsibility of an assistant to play the song. So, as he entered, the song kind of soared,” Eisenberg says, explaining that as writers, that’s the kind of detail they could never make up.
But it also fits so perfectly with the series. “That song is anthemic and it feels triumphant. And it feels so of the moment and it feels so much of what the show is,” he says, with Crevello adding, “It was like a fun challenge of, how do you take the most exuberant song ever and turn it into something that feels tragic?”
And so by the finale, when the orchestral version is heard over scenes that were foreshadowed in the premiere, “they kind of have a different feel to it now. It feels less triumphant,” Eisenberg explains, noting that that version “really gave a kind of grandeur to the finale.”
WeCrashed is now streaming on Apple TV+.
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