- Since December, the price of GameStop stock has surged more than 1,700% as of the time of this writing, thanks to an extraordinary stock-buying binge organized via Reddit.
- The resulting dynamic, in which a group of amateur investors beat Wall Street professionals and hedge funds, has dominated news headlines and talk on social channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit for more than a week now.
- A Hollywood studio has already acquired the movie rights to a forthcoming book about the Reddit-GameStop story.
If you still don’t understand why everyone was so hyper-focused last week on the GameStop stock price, or what Reddit had to do with it all, don’t worry. Thanks to yet another wild turn of this truly insane story, you can now just wait for the movie version.
2021 is only a month old, so can we just stop for a moment and appreciate the fact that we’ve already had a non-Trump, non-political news story that’s so insane, a studio has already acquired the movie rights to a book being written about it? Almost any way you look at it, this GameStop story is as wild as it gets. First and foremost, the news is barely a week or so old. It involves retail investors using Reddit to coordinate a stock-buying binge that screwed deep-pocketed Wall Street pros who were trying to make money by shorting the stock of, let’s face it, a boring, bricks-and-mortar reliant business that’s trying to adapt to the digital age: GameStop. New York Times bestselling author Ben Mezrich (the guy who wrote the book upon which the movie The Social Network was based) has drafted a book proposal for The Antisocial Network, which will unpack the Reddit-GameStop story that dominated news headlines and social media last week, with a particular focus on how Wall Street big shots got their comeuppance thanks to a confederation of trollish Redditors and amateur stock investors. And, again, even though this news is only about a week old, and Mezrich’s book is only a proposal at this point, plans are already in the works to turn this all into a movie.
Deadline broke the news that MGM had acquired the rights to Mezrich’s book proposal, with the eventual movie also serving as a reunion of sorts. MGM’s Michael DeLuca also produced The Social Network, the movie dramatizing the story of Facebook which was based on Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding Of Facebook, a Tale Of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal.
A ragtag band of redditers taking on Wall Street is a pretty good movie pitch, actually. https://t.co/HWAlLlx0LF
— Ben Mezrich (@benmezrich) January 27, 2021
By way of a brief recap, here’s what you need to know about the GameStop news. Amateur investors decided to plow into GameStop’s stock because of how heavily the company’s shares were being shorted by professional Wall Street investors. The latter saw nothing but a decline in GameStop’s future, based on the physical retail model underpinning GameStop’s business.
Because of how short-selling works, the Wall Street investors were banking on the share price of GameStop falling over time. If it did, they’d make money. This is where the Redditors and amateur investors come into the picture. They arranged a massive buying binge of GameStock stock, which sent the share price surging higher. That caused the video game chain’s stock price to explode more than 1,700% since December.
Between Tuesday and Wednesday of last week alone, GameStop’s market capitalization rose by more than $10 billion.
