You might think that a movie called Dumb Money featuring Pete Davidson and Seth Rogen would be a fun buddy comedy (it might be, the jury is still out) but it’s actually based on a very real story from not too long ago. Who could forget those few weeks in 2021 when everyone was randomly talking about GameStop, the preferred store of teenage boys?
Dumb Money is loosely based on Ben Mezrich’s 2021 book The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees. Paul Dano stars as investor Keith Gill, a YouTuber and avid Reddit user who spearheaded the GameStop stock squeeze of 2021 which caused chaos on Wall Street. A group of working-class investors short-squeezed a bunch of billionaire investors, played in the film by Rogen and Nick Offerman, and showed how the system can easily fail.
The movie highlights the power imbalance between Wall Street investors and your average working parent who managed to use the system to their advantage before the higher-ups stepped in, proving that the system is actually rigged. Even the Mormons got in on the action!
Dumb Money, also starring Shailene Woodley, Vincent D’Onofrio, America Ferrera, Anthony Ramos, and Sebastian Stan, hits theaters September 22nd.
(Via TIME)