the battle of Gamestop fans against Wall Street

The movie “Dumb Money” is inspired by a true story that shook Wall Street.

Looking back at the alliance of thousands of stock marketers to save their favorite video game brand attacked by investors, Dumb Money, in theaters Wednesday, November 29, delivers a fable about how Wall Street can falter, but always ends up winning. Inspired by real events, the film is carried by actor Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine and more recently The Fabelmans by Spielberg), in the role of Keith Gill, aka “Roaring Kitty”, a former financial analyst now broke, at the heart of the affair.

Dumb Moneya reference to “dumb money”, an expression with which the Wall Street giants refer to small investors, returns to the stock market whirlwind around GameStop at the start of 2021, which was even the subject of an investigation by the US Congress.

Between 2015 and 2020, the stock market value of the video game store chain, which owns Micromania in France, was divided by 10. Not enough for many large investment funds which were still betting on the price drop. But far too much according to “Roaring Kitty”. From his cellar, he defends in video and on Reddit forums why he is a buyer of the stock and accuses the investment funds of wanting the death of the company.

“This affair has profoundly changed Wall Street”

The film shows how this appeal will be widely disseminated, mobilizing in the middle of a pandemic from the student in debt to the precarious nurse to inflict billions of dollars in losses on the Citadel fund and its founder, installed in a luxurious house in Florida. But also how the Wall Street system defends itself to try to put down this online rebellion which is by nature very unstable and disorganized, and whose wealth can disappear as suddenly as it arrived.

“I think this affair has profoundly changed Wall Street and the behavior of investment funds”assured AFP the Australian director Craig Gillespie, who experienced this story from the inside, one of his sons having been part of the cohort of stock traders.

“I felt the frustration, the feeling that the system was against them and I wanted to dig into that a little. It’s not necessarily illegal” but pose “ethical questions”according to the director who will soon release a new Cruella at Disney, and was noticed in 2017 with Me, Tonya with Margot Robbie, in the world of figure skating. “It’s the system that is at fault”he adds.

For the production, he limited the sequences of financial explanations as much as possible. Only the share price is given – it will go from less than a dollar in the summer of 2020 to more than 120 dollars during the session on January 28, 2021 -, the bewilderment at this surge being the only thing that unites all the protagonists. Since then, the share price has fallen back towards $12.