The “meme stock” craze of 2021 is getting the Hollywood treatment. 

In 2021, amateur investors bought mass shares of video game retailer GameStop and other struggling stocks, pitting them against the Wall Street executives who had shorted them. The GameStop stock then skyrocketed, leaving hedge fund managers losing billions while making headlines worldwide.   

At their January 2021 peak, GameStop shares sold for more than US$81, compared to about $5 at the start of the month.  

While the saga has already been put to film in several documentaries, the Toronto International Film Festival is premiering “Dumb Money,” the first live-action, scripted dramatization of the story, starring Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, Pete Davidson and America Ferrera.  

“This movie takes you on a wild ride,” Rebecca Angelo, one of the writers and executive producers of the movie, told BNN Bloomberg in a television interview. “You can walk out of the theatre realizing – as we all do – that there are big problems, terrible economic inequality all around us, but there is hope.”  

Angelo wrote and produced the movie with Lauren Schuker Blum. The pair were coworkers at the Wall Street Journal at the time of the meme stock craze. 

“We were baffled by what was happening, alarmed by it, intrigued and we immediately started researching it and saw it was much bigger than just about GameStop, it was actually about a movement happening,” Schuker Blum said in the interview. 

The movie follows the recent releases of other business films “BlackBerry,” “Tetris” and “Air,” but while those movies took liberties with stories that inspired them, Angelo and Schuker Blum said they worked hard to get as many of the details as they could. 

“It was really important for us to get the story right,” Schuker Blum said. “As reporters, we really wanted to get the facts out there, but also tell the story in a really entertaining way, because it is this wild ride.”

The film premieres at TIFF on Sept. 8, with a second public screening on Sept. 10.