Remember the whole GameStop stonks thing from a couple years ago? It’s kind of complicated and kind of stupid, and frankly I don’t think anyone is entirely sure exactly what happened, but the bottom line is that a guy on Reddit started talking about GameStop stocks, then Elon Musk tweeted about it, then everyone went nuts, and then—for a brief while—profit. The whole thing had a certain Wolf of Wall Street vibe to it (except that the wolf in this case was Roaring Kitty) and sure enough, work to bring the tale to film was soon underway.
Today Sony Pictures Entertainment unveiled the first trailer for its contribution to that cinematic effort: A flick called Dumb Money, “the insane true story of everyday people who flipped the script on Wall Street and got rich by turning GameStop (yes, the mall videogame store) into the world’s hottest company.”
“In the middle of everything is regular guy Keith Gill (Paul Dano), who starts it all by sinking his life savings into the stock and posting about it,” the YouTube listing states. “When his social posts start blowing up, so does his life and the lives of everyone following him. As a stock tip becomes a movement, everyone gets rich—until the billionaires fight back, and both sides find their worlds turned upside down.”
Dumb Money boasts an impressive cast: Paul Dano heads things up as Keith Gill, aka DeepFuckingValue/Roaring Kitty, the analyst and investor who got the GameStop ball rolling; also on the marquee are Pete Davidson, Vincent D’Onofrio, America Ferrera, Nick Offerman, Anthony Ramos, Sebastian Stan, Shailene Woodley, and Seth Rogen. (According to IMDB, Clancy Brown is in it too, which is cool.)
There is literally nobody in that cast I don’t like (and just as a side note, I would pay serious money for a Midnight Run reboot starring Offerman and Rogen), and yet the trailer leaves me oddly cold. Maybe it’s because I bore witness to the whole thing as it happened, but from the other side—the memes and the shitposts, rather than the actual business—but nothing about this video churns up even the slightest bit of interest in the full film. Yes, it was fun to watch rich people eat it amidst the call for “diamond hands,” but the net result was very destructive to people who weren’t prepared for what happened when the bottom dropped out. Some made money, but others suffered real, lasting harm. In light of that, do I care what happened to Steve Cohen or Gabe Plotkin as a result of all this? No, I do not.
(For the record, they are both still incredibly wealthy.)
Dumb Money, for the record, is the film based on the book The Antisocial Network, written by Ben Mezrich, who famously sold the rights to the film to MGM before the book was even written. It’s set to debut in theaters on September 22.
