The GameStop saga is getting a movie. Seth Rogen is cast as Wall Street Bets' most reviled hedge funder, and Paul Dano will play meme-stock hero Roaring Kitty.
- Hollywood's upcoming film "Dumb Money" depicts the 2021 events surrounding the mania behind the GameStop stock.
- Seth Rogen will star as hedge fund manager Gabe Plotkin who lost billions of dollars on his GameStop short.
- Nick Offerman will portray Citadel founder Ken Griffin, while Paul Dano will star as Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty.
The GameStop short-squeeze of 2021 is headed to the big screen later this year and will portray the wild saga behind the video-game retailer's soaring stock price in the early days of the pandemic.
GameStop stock soared more than 2,000% in early 2021 as a swarm of retail traders piled into the stock and sparked a short-squeeze that cost some hedge funds billions of dollars in losses. The wild rally came despite the fact that the underlying business of GameStop was struggling amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and was an important early event in the wider story of the retail trading boom in recent years.
The upcoming movie, titled "Dumb Money", will star Seth Rogen as hedge fund manager Gabe Plotkin, Nick Offerman as Citadel founder Ken Griffin, and Paul Dano as Keith Gill, known in internet circles as Roaring Kitty, and who helped spark the surge in GameStop stock by rallying swarms of retail traders on Reddit and YouTube.
Plotkin's hedge fund Melvin Capital ultimately lost billions of dollars due to its ill-timed short bet against GameStop, and Griffin was at the center of the controversy due to the unfounded suspicion that his firm Citadel Securities had an influence on Robinhood's decision to briefly halt trading of certain meme stocks like GameStop on on its platforms.
The movie also stars Pete Davidson who plays a pot-smoking retail trader that bought shares in GameStop and benefited from the short squeeze, and Sebastian Stan who plays Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev.
The movie will be released by Sony Pictures and a teaser trailer for the film dropped at CinemaCon 2023 on Monday. The movie is based on the book "The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to its Knees" by Ben Mezrich.