Hollywood has been feeding on absurd real-life stories for many years now, so it should come as no surprise that its next big story is an adaptation of when gamers managed to beat Wall Street. And if that premise sounds like something absurd, you won’t be disappointed to learn that the real-life story behind Dumb Money, the new film from Craig Gillespie, director of I, Tonya, is as delusional as it sounds.
Dumb Money, adapted from the book The Antisocial Network by Ben Mezrich, is an account of when several members of Reddit’s r/wallstreetbets subforum decided to manipulate the market in light of GameStop’s fall. Since the company was falling, many people were deciding to invest short. What does this mean? It means that the short investor asks an investor who has shares in a certain company to lend them to him to sell, and when they go down in price, buy them back at a much lower price, return them to the investor who lent them to him and keep the difference. Given that the company was falling, it was a safe bet. Until the r/wallstreetbets came along and, organizing themselves, bought shares as cheaply as possible, driving the stock up from $20 to $60. Destroying the short-sellers.
Why was this catastrophic? Because Wall Street, with the hedge funds, banks and their mutual funds as the main players affected, base a large part of their profits on bearish bets. And given the success they had with GameStop, they decided to continue to do so with other companies, something that would end up with some investment firms losing up to 30% of their value and with Wall Street itself adding vastly more restrictive regulations on who and how they can make investments. Something that goes against their own anti-regulationist ideology.
All of this could have literally ended the current economic system as we know it. Which, in addition to being wonderful, would have been delirious for a group of Reddit fans who are more like a group of people betting on roulette than a group of investors, even if there isn’t that much difference between the two groups. And that’s what Dumb Money seeks to exploit, according to its first trailer.
With Paul Dano playing Keith Gill, the investor and analyst known as u/DeepFuckingValue on r/wallstreetbets and RoaringKitty on other platforms, and with other big names on board like Shailene Woodley, Seth Rogen, or Nick Offerman, the film has the potential to be one of those gems that we didn’t expect, but that ends up being a fascinating work that ends up having a brutal effect on the collective imagination. The film will be released on September 22nd by Sony Pictures Releasing.
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