Rival GameStop movies being rushed into production
The GameStop content race is on, even as the Redditfueled market rebellion against billionaire hedge funds continues to play out in real time. Netflix is reportedly in talks to ink a film adaptation of the social media David v Goliath saga, in which a small army of online investors upended Wall Street by driving up the prices of shares in the ailing video game chain and other shorted companies, with Mark Boal (Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker) set to write and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before’s Noah Centineo attached to star.
The as-yet-untitled project would be the second adaptation of the merely two-weeks-old GameStop saga already in development, after MGM acquired rights in a bidding war last week to the book proposal The Antisocial Network by Ben Mezrich, the author of The Accidental Billionaires, which served as source material for The Social Network. That adaptation is set to be produced by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss,
both played by Armie Hammer in David Fincher’s drama. An auction for the book itself will begin this month.
According to Deadline, which broke the news, sources claim the Netflix project would use the recent market frenzy, in which a motley crew of Reddit users and amateur investors targeted billionaire hedge funds’ shortselling bets and sent GameStop stocks surging 135% on a single day, to explore the broader cultural shifts, for good and ill, as social media has leveled the playing field and overruled former gatekeepers.
The film will reportedly cover the GameStop saga as well as the proliferation of misinformation on social media and intentionally disseminated disinformation on election fraud, which propelled the pro-Trump assault on the US Capitol earlier this month.
This is not the first time Boal has incorporated real-time developments into a fast-track screenplay; following the news that US Navy Seals had killed Osama bin Laden in a 2011 raid in Pakistan, Boal and his directing partner, Kathryn Bigelow, quickly adapted a long-gestating project on the hunt for the al-Qaida leader into Zero Dark Thirty, a thriller on controversial US intelligence techniques and the successful raid.