Okay, screenwriters, directors, authors, and production companies — we get it. You have some experience telling stories about Wall Street, the video game industry, or social networks, and you see some mighty big dollar signs in the true tale of how Reddit managed to drive an ailing video game retailer’s stocks to completely ridiculous highs through sheer power of will plus a David versus Goliath narrative that probably doesn’t hold up under close examination.
Please GameStop it, Hollywood
The money grab continues, just not on Reddit
The money grab continues, just not on Reddit
Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
So you’re making movies — five of them — and two shows. Why not? It’s not like any one person has the rights to a news event like this!
As of Thursday, February 11th:
- HBO now has a movie from the guy who wrote Too Big to Fail and co-created Showtime’s Billions
- MGM optioned a movie based on a book that hasn’t even been written yet whose author you’ll probably know from the book that became David Fincher’s The Social Network
- WallStreetBets’s founder has sold his life story to RatPac, a production company that worked on movies like X-Men: First Class and The Revenant, before its founder was accused of sexual misconduct in 2018
- Netflix is negotiating with the screenwriter of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty to write yet another movie, with one of those cute guys from To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before playing a role
- Netflix is also working on a docu-series with Story Syndicate, the production company behind HBO’s I’ll Be Gone In The Dark
- The writer and director of Console Wars (a book, also a movie) now have a feature-length documentary that’s “fully financed and already in production”
- And yes, there’s a whole TV show. How can this possibly turn into a TV show?
No. But just in case yes, we imagine this set of completely disparate productions will need some excellent titles going forward. May we humbly suggest:
- GameStop: Never Stop Stopping
- Uncut GMEs
- Meme Streets
- Short Stop
- From Pre-Order to Stock Order
- I Have No Shares, and I Must Sell
- Hate the Player, Not the GME
- The Weeb of Wall Street
- The Game is Up
- GameStop Won’t Stop
- Diamond Hands
- Robinhood and the Men in Gamer Chairs
- To The Moon, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and HODL
- This Theater Still Exists Because of This Movie’s Events (remember AMC?)
- The Bankrupting of the Hedge Fund Melvin Capital by the Internet Message Board WallStreetBets
P.S. The dictionary definition of the word “stonk” is “a concentrated artillery bombardment,” so if I told you there is now a stonk of GameStop movies in development, that would largely be correct.
Update February 11th, 6:24PM ET: Added two more projects to the list, because Hollywood doesn’t know when to hodl.
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