GameStop’s Hollywood moment is finally coming this October. Sony announced its dramatization of the video game retailer’s meme stock explosion will hit theaters in October, starring Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, Pete Davidson and more. It’s called Dumb Money. I hope it lives up to it.
It’s adapted from author Ben Mezrich’s book The Antisocial Network, which details how the commission-less trading platform Robinhood paved the way for the gamification of day trading and, ultimately, a GameStop meme stock bubble that entertained Reddit and short-squeezed hedge funds for billions. Nick Offerman (The Last of Us), Vincent D’Onofrio (Daredevil), and Shailene Woodley (Divergent) are also on the cast list, while Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl, Cruella) is directing.
Mezrich sold the rights to his book before it had even been written, and Dumb Money follows previous Hollywood adaptations of his work, most notably Bringing Down the House which became 21, and The Accidental Billionaires, which became The Social Network. Those two films are of dramatically different quality, and who knows which bucket Dumb Money will fall into. Maybe it’ll be The Big Short for Reddit, or maybe it’ll be more like HBO’s stilted Too Big to Fail.
There have been a lot of documentaries already about the GameStop frenzy, and while some have offered intriguing and intimate windows into the lives of ordinary people coming into giant windfalls thanks to the meme stock lottery, many have also oversold the David and Goliath narrative around Redditors steeped in 4chan-speak fleecing the suits on Wall Street in an attempt to democratize the stock market.
It was certainly an accurate representation of a lot of the rhetoric being thrown around at the time, but it’s clear in hindsight that lots of large institutional investors made out in the meme stock bonanza as well. That said, there’s no shortage of batshit moments peppered throughout the whole saga. Even now, GameStop’s biggest superstonkers remain in the throes of some wild conspiracy theories.