We're now up to three movies and a documentary about the GameStop "stonks" thing
Earlier this week, we reported on Hollywood’s heroic efforts to swiftly pass not just one, but two films about the recent GameStop/Reddit/“stonks” story through its vast and labyrinthine bowels. Lured in by a narrative that promises equal parts “David beats (?) Goliath,” get-rich-quick scheming, and endless opportunities to explain whatever the fuck a “short squeeze” is, MGM and Netflix were both quick to try to secure their own takes on the story, with the former teaming up with Social Network source material author Ben Mezrich, and the latter reportedly trying to get The Hurt Locker’s Mark Boal on the hook.
Now, in a development we could probably link to a pithy Wall Street metaphor about inflation or some shit if we knew one goddamn thing about how the economy works, two more projects about the phenomenon have also been added to the pile. On the one hand, Variety reports that Blumhouse is getting into the narrative feature mix, teaming up with HBO for their own spin on the story, complete with what we’re sure will be a very dramatic recreation of people yelling the word “stonks!” via their keyboards, and maybe a mournful zoom in on that one “chicken tenders” tweet that had so many people so mad. (Billions creator Andrew Ross Sorkin is involved in that one, too.) On the other, we’re also hearing that documentary production company Optimist has begun a as-non-fiction-as-this-is-gonna-get account of the whole r/WallStreetBets story, the inspiring tale of a bunch of financial iconoclasts rising up to [tk tk fill in this part after you understand what the fuck actually happened here].
As this story has pretty conclusively proved, predicting the future is functionally impossible. So trying to figure out which, if any, of these projects will ever come to actual fruition is a pretty clear fools’ errand. Obviously, though, filmmakers understand that something happened with this story that made a whole lot of people feel a whole lot of something, and that it can’t be all that difficult to translate those strong emotions into money. Hey, wait: Maybe we do understand the economy after all!