From a 2023 perspective, the financial war depicted in Dumb Money may seem like a dimly remembered headline from a bygone time. The so-called GameStop short squeeze happened in January 2021, when the world was reeling from a multitude of far bigger problems: COVID lockdowns, vaccine shortages, the Capitol insurrection. In the shadow of such colossal events, a disparate group of small-time investors began driving up the stock price of a brick-and-mortar video game store that had previously been destined for oblivion.
The fluctuations of a single stock would hardly have garnered much attention—except that this vast group of small-scale investors, unifying mainly in Reddit groups and the comment threads of YouTube videos, managed to line their pockets (at least temporarily) while upending the balance sheets of a small cadre of ultrawealthy, politically connected millionaires and billionaires.
The GameStop buyers literally used a stock-buying app called Robinhood, which allowed them to take from the rich—like investment management firm Melvin Capital, which had placed large bets that the company would continue to collapse—and give to the poor (namely, themselves). Now their story is being told in the movie Dumb Money, featuring an all-star cast that includes Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, America Ferrera, Pete Davidson, Shailene Woodley, Nick Offerman, Anthony Ramos, and Sebastian Stan. The backstory of how it unfolded is like a cross between Caddyshack and Wall Street, with the nobodies outmaneuvering the somebodies—at least until the rules abruptly change.
Rogen, who plays one of the multi-millionaire hedge fund managers whose business goes topsy-turvy because of the GameStop rally, says Dumb Money illustrates how much of the financial system is rigged to benefit those who already dominate it. “It is purposely convoluted—you know what I mean?—in a way that is designed to keep people out of it,” he says. “The price of entry is understanding this completely bizarre system. It's so hard! Could you explain to me, conceptually, what shorting of stock is and why that is a thing that exists? I still have a hard time wrapping my head around it. And I think that's the point.”
Director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya and Cruella) saw the GameStop stock frenzy play out in his own household, telling Vanity Fair that a close member of his family was one of the millions of small-scale buyers who took part. “My son, who’s 24, was very involved in the whole run, and happened to be living at our house at the time,” the filmmaker says. “So through him, I got to experience the emotional roller coaster and the pain and the frustration and the outrage.”
The movie, set to debut on September 22, is based on the nonfiction book The Antisocial Network by Ben Mezrich. The screenplay is by Rebecca Angelo and Lauren Schuker Blum, both Orange Is the New Black writers who previously worked as journalists. Gillespie added his son’s eyewitness experiences to the mix, although most of the smaller buyers are fictionalized amalgams. “We tried to cover the gamut of the various scenarios that happened,” Gillespie says. “There were the early traders that got in and made money. There were the traders that came in too late. They were the ones that didn’t sell, which sadly was quite a lot of people. So we tried to represent the various groups.”
Gillespie says Dumb Money also tries to capture the underlying and overwhelming dissatisfaction that rampaged through the culture during lockdown—and persists to today. “Obviously, with what was going on with COVID, the alienation, the wanting to connect with other people…there was also the Black Lives Matter movement going on. There were a lot of ways that people were trying to speak out or just be heard. This became a vehicle for that,” the filmmaker says. “They got to give the middle finger to the banking industry and also make some money along the way. It was a win-win.”
Gillespie acknowledged it was sometimes like making a series of short films. “It was very unusual. Usually, you get into a rhythm with your cast as you’re making a film,” the filmmaker says. “Every three days we had a different actor coming in. It was fun in many senses but also, in the midst of COVID, it was stressful that if any one of them got COVID, it would be a domino effect on the whole schedule.”
