Dumb Money director Craig Gillespie on retelling the GameStop saga
The new film chronicles the infamous stock frenzy that took place in January 2021
In early 2021, you might remember how an online movement started on Reddit led thousands of amateur retail investors to teach Wall Street a lesson. It was one of the biggest financial sagas of modern times, and it can be summed up in one word: GameStop.
Just two years later, the insane true story of everyday people who flipped the script on greedy Wall Street hedge fund managers has already been turned into a film, Dumb Money, directed by Craig Gillespie.
"The very simplistic version was the hedge funds were betting the stock would go down and all the Reddit users were betting it would go up — and if it did go up, it would royally screw all the hedge funds," Gillespie explains in an interview with Q's Tom Power.
On the surface, the director says the film is about stocks, but underneath that, it's a powerful David and Goliath tale about a movement that took hold during the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to this day.
"COVID was an experience as a civilization which we haven't had for a century," says Gillespie. "There was this real sense of this wealth disparity that's going on in the world. You were seeing it on social media, you were seeing the frustrations of not having government aid — particularly in the United States — people losing their homes, people losing loved ones, social movements like Black Lives Matter. There was this real reckoning coming on.…
"It happened to be that GameStop became like the perfect mouthpiece for this frustration. It happened to be that it was a stock that, in the way that people could have an opportunity to make money, they could have an opportunity to be heard. And there was this collection of people on WallStreetBets, it went from 400,000 people in eight weeks to eight million people. And they really wanted these one-per-centers, or in many cases, these point-oh-one-per-centers, to know how frustrated they were with the wealth disparity in this country, with the system feeling inherently rigged against them. And this was the way to do it."
WATCH | Official trailer for Dumb Money:
The full interview with Craig Gillespie is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Craig Gillespie produced by Mitch Pollock.
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