GameStop Meme Stock’s documentary hits theaters this week

It was just a year ago, this week, that meme stocks, Mad Stonks, and GameStop grabbed mainstream attention, mouthed billion-dollar hedge funds, and made anarchist day traders very wealthy. A year is long enough to shoot the first major documentary about mania: GameStop: Rise of the Gamers, from the creators of the 2020s console wars.

Jonah Tulis and Blake J. Harris who produced console wars for Paramount Plus, are back to tell the story of the short squeeze that sent GameStop’s stock price – viewed as a stone-age mall headed for blockbuster-style extinction – to over $300. It had been around $5 in the summer of 2020 when other video game companies were reaping huge revenues thanks to COVID quarantine games.

The stock peaked at $325 on January 29, 2021 when Redditors from the r/wallstreetbets community got involved, hoarding and holding onto shares of the company no matter how high the price went. This resulted in huge losses for large investment houses that had shorted the stock, a practice that is effectively a bet on future price declines.

In the episode the trading app Robinhood suspended transactions, Congress held hearings (with Keith “Roaring Kitty” Gill testifying from his Game of Thrones gaming chair), lawsuits were filed and short sellers were made Estimated to have lost a total of $6 billion. And while ticker symbol GME’s share price plummeted almost as quickly, it hardly killed the company or the investment. GameStop closed at $102.67 on Thursday, which would have been an outrageous number in fall 2020.

Tulis (as director) and Harris position themselves GameStop: Rise of the Gamers as a David vs. Goliath tale as told by the Reddit traders who hit the road and the investment bankers who screwed up. It’s a documentary, like console wars, so this is not a dramatization like The great short film (to which this incident has often been compared) or script work in development at Netflix, HBO, and elsewhere. GameStop: Rise of the Gamers will air in theaters only starting January 28, 2022.