‘Dumb Money’ Creators Explain Decision To Include Real TikTok Clips In Their GameStop Movie Made “By The People For The People” – Contenders Film L.A.

deadline.com:

Dumb Money producer Aaron Ryder talked Saturday about why he wanted to bring to screen the story of GameStop’s short squeeze of 2021, a financial fluke that has gone down in history as a triumph for the little guy against the behemoths of Wall Street.

Speaking at Deadline’s Contenders Film Los Angeles event, Ryder revealed he had been inspired to make the film after tirelessly following the story in real time during lockdown. “I went deep on it, trying to understand what the short was and to educate myself,” he told moderator Anthony D’Alessandro. “I got a call from MGM [where he has a production deal], who said, ‘We think there’s a movie here.’ “What we needed was a piece of IP.

There was a lot of competition. I knew we had to be first [to option Ben Mezrich’s book The Antisocial Network]. Luckily, we were, and our next task was finding the right people to adapt this idea into a movie,” Ryder said. RELATED: The Contenders Film: Los Angeles – Deadline’s Full Coverage Enter Lauren Schumer Blum and Rebecca Angelo, two longtime financial journalists-turned-TV writers, for whom Dumb Money is their first movie after dozens of previous ideas that didn’t make it to screen.

Angelo said several of those ideas shared the same theme of social media-driven populism. “That is one of the most important forces shaping the world today,” she said. “We’ve been working for years to develop a cinematic language that would make that experience visceral and connections emotional.