The Race to Get the GameStop Story to the Big Screen

“Dumb Money" which is out in wide release this weekend, got there first. The new movie, directed by Craig Gillespie and released by Sony Pictures, is a frantic ensemble comedy about a digital war between the haves and the have-nots with Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP" on the soundtrack.

This year has seen a wave of business stories making it to the big screen—from the Nike shoe tale “Air," set in 1984, to the smartphone story “BlackBerry," which takes place at the dawn of the 21st century. But “Dumb Money" is based on events that happened just two years ago. When the screenplay was in its early stages, the congressional hearing that is dramatized for its climax hadn’t even happened yet.

“They were like, ‘Run, but don’t hand us a script unless it’s perfect,’" said co-screenwriter Lauren Schuker Blum, a former Wall Street Journal reporter. “So that was a balance of trying to do this quickly but also getting it right."

“Dumb Money" stars Paul Dano as Keith Gill, also known as “Roaring Kitty," the YouTuber and redditor who became a folk hero for leading the movement on r/WallStreetBets, resulting in losses for hedge funds and their leaders. They include Melvin Capital’s Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen), who bet on GameStop’s failure. Around them is a cast of characters representing the average people who were captivated by Gill’s message and started buying GameStop stock themselves—a nurse (America Ferrera), a GameStop store employee (Anthony Ramos), and a pair of partying college students (Myha’la Herrold and Talia Ryder).

Producer Aaron Ryder was in Covid quarantine in Canada on the way to prep another film when he fell down the GameStop Reddit “rabbit hole" as the stock was going wild. “The more I started to learn about it, the more I was like, there’s something wildly unusual here," he said. “Suddenly Wall Street was getting gamified by people who were at home."

At the time, Ryder had a deal with MGM, and received word that its board chairman, Anchorage Capital hedge-fund manager Kevin Ulrich, thought there might be a movie version of what was currently playing out online.

Ryder agreed and leapt at the task, acquiring the rights to Ben Mezrich’s then-unpublished book “The Antisocial Network." He also brought on screenwriters and Wall Street Journal alums Rebecca Angelo and Schuker Blum to adapt the film before hiring Gillespie, the director of “I, Tonya."

“We’re Hollywood producers so we are heat-seeking missiles," he said, regarding the speed at which he jumped on the idea. “If everyone’s chasing it, the thing you have to do is become real first." Ulrich couldn’t be reached for comment.

The sale of MGM to Amazon briefly left the movie in limbo in 2022, when Amazon did not green light it. Then another producer with ties to Wall Street stepped in: Teddy Schwarzman, son of Blackstone co-founder Stephen Schwarzman, provided financing through his company Black Bear Pictures, before Sony came in as distributor. “We just thought that, not just the topicality, but the themes, the resonance, and what it said about the state of unrest and the state of the American dream, would just have a massive impact," Schwarzman said.

Two other boldface business names have producing credits: Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss of Winklevoss Capital Management.

Angelo said she and Schuker Blum wanted to take a different approach than other Hollywood depictions of finance, from “Wall Street" to “The Big Short. “I think most of them are told from the top down," she said. “They mostly are about the high rollers, the smartest people on Wall Street and our absolute priority was to tell the story from the perspective of the regular man and woman who got involved in this."

Although they used Mezrich’s book as a starting point, the writers also relied on their reporting backgrounds to do their own research. They tried to engage the Gill family at every stage of the process. They never reached Gill himself, but they eventually made contact with his relatives.

Elsewhere, they combed Reddit to find sources. “Obviously, this is a financial story," Schuker Blum said. “But our real question was: Why are people drawn to buy this stock, how does it fit into our life story?"

It was a perspective director Gillespie knew well: One of his sons, who was living with him during the height of Covid, was an r/WallStreetBets aficionado. Shortly after he finished shooting, Gillespie had his children invite about 20 of their friends to watch an early cut and give feedback. They shot down exposition sections where characters were “very preachy about knowing what was going on," Gillespie said.

As much as the filmmakers wanted to orient “Dumb Money" toward the point of view of the average GameStop investor, they didn’t want to paint a one-dimensional picture of their hedge-fund enemies either.

“It’s really important to us that nothing we do becomes a simple story of heroes and villains," Angelo said. “Hedge fund guys: Some of them are really good husbands and really good fathers and really menschy dudes and it was important for us to capture that."

Despite the race to make “Dumb Money," in some ways it’s already a nostalgia piece: It depicts the grim realities of the days before there was widespread access to the Covid vaccine, even though they sparingly reference the virus by name. “This story wouldn’t have happened without the pandemic," Schuker Blum said. “It was the perfect storm, everyone’s trapped at home on their phones doing Robinhood."

Masks become a class signifier on screen. In the film, the wealthy prance around their restrictive universes without them, while the everyman GameStop investors constantly shield their faces.

“People want the wealthy to be held accountable," he said. “It happened to be a great vehicle for that."