The new trailer for Hulu's Gamestop stock doc looks like a headache waiting to happen

This may be hard to believe—on account of time becoming an ever-more amorphous blob of accruing events in recent years—but the big Gamestop stock short squeeze was a year and a half ago at this point. You remember: Consumer stock traders, initially organized on Reddit, noticed that Wall Street hedge funds were short-selling the stock of the embattled gaming brand, and so decided to squeeze the stock, driving its price up—simultaneously costing the big guys lots of money, making a lot of single-person operations much richer, and getting the phrase “David And Goliath story” back in the news for a couple of weeks.

Oh, yeah, you remember; there’s that familiar little headache sensation this story always used to cause!

Said sensation is in its full glory in the new trailer for Gamestop, Hulu’s documentary about the whole affair, which appears to be so determined to convince you that this story about stock manipulation is exciting that it basically blast processes the entire narrative straight into your face. (Apparently a signature feature of director Jonah Tullis, whose co-directed 2020 feature Console Wars was also an energetically irritating slice of video game history.)

Of course, you don’t have to take our word for it; Gamestop: Rise Of The Players has been out on Hulu for a few weeks now, with this latest trailer an obvious attempt to drive more “stonks” fans to the title—which employs animation, talking heads, and way too many meme pictures to tell the story of this particular form of consumer revolt. The doc itself has pulled mixed reviews from critics, citing Tulis’ insatiable need to jam more imagery on the screen at any given second. But who are critics, but the Wall Street fat cats of the entertainment world? Watch the trailer, make up your own mind, spend an hour looking up what the hell a “short squeeze” is; yeah, we definitely remember this damn story.