In an age where people rave about crypto and NFTs, there's still room for some good, old fashioned share trading. Or, in this case, some dodgy, high-tech share trading. The GameStop share affair in early 2021 has been the subject of plenty of books and several projects are in development about it. The highest profile example as of now might be a film called Dumb Money, which just secured Pete Davidson, Seth Rogen, Sebastian Stan and Paul Dano to star.
Craig Gillespie – who has worked with at least two of those (Rogen and Stan on the recent Pam & Tommy, Stan alone on I, Tonya) – is in the director's chair here, with the script adapted by Rebecca Angelo and Lauren Schuker Blum.
They worked from Ben Mezrich's book The Antisocial Network, which chronicled the January 2021 “short squeeze” movement around retail chain GameStop, where users of the Reddit page 'Wall Street Bets' banded together to artificially increase the stock values of the company, which suffered from lagging stock prices for years.
The situation resulted in major hedge funds as well as independent short sellers taking significant financial losses, and it caused calls for more regulation of the stock market.
Filming on the movie will kick off this month, and the project will be out to buyers at the Toronto Film Festival.