For those with one eye trained on a news chyron for at least part of the day, it might seem a little too soon to be sitting down to watch Hollywood’s definitive retelling of 2021’s GameStop saga, an all-consuming financial soap opera that forced many of us to suddenly feign expertise in what a short squeeze is. But it’s perhaps fitting that the story, which trickled up from Reddit to Wall Street within weeks and was turned from a CNN ratings-winner to an Amazon bestseller within months, would become a film in just over two years.
It was an inevitable race to production with other projects announced around the same time but it was an adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s speedily written The Antisocial Network that won out, now known as Dumb Money, a slick crowd-pleaser that makes light work of a difficult story. For as juicy as the twists and turns may be they were mostly juicy to those who were educated on the specifics of not just the story but the world within which it was playing out. Hollywood’s ongoing obsession with framing tech tales as Shakespearean dramas, with recent films and shows based around the highs and lows of Uber, WeWork and Blackberry, has mostly required very little expertise from viewers going in. They’re familiar industry narratives, old stories with a new setting.
