It goes without saying that the proliferation of scripted GameStop projects, with development costs that will soon be in the millions, represents a bubble as untethered to the real world’s demand as anything that has happened recently in the stock market. For starters, it’s unclear what the story is, even journalistically let alone as fiction, or even who the characters would be. I can confirm, though, that it’s going to be really fucking funny when we're asked to believe that himbo Noah Centineo is lurking on r/WallStreetBets.
If there has to be a movie about all this, it might as well involve this guy. (H/t to my wife #wifeguy.)
Instead, there are a lot of hugely successful Serious Men (only men) in middle age who want to make the movie (movies? dear god). They earn as much money as nearly anybody at Melvin Capital but see themselves in the guys on Reddit working at Wendy's, because Hollywood always thinks it's the little guy. In reality, r/WallStreetBets was a home for a very specific kind of little guy, steeped in a gleeful nihilism so total that they really might be risking all of their savings just for the lulz. These movies would be monuments to their producers’ self-images & to Not Getting The Internet…
Netflix, Mark Boal & Noah Centineo's endeavor seems most likely to get made. There's precedent for Netflix greenlighting a movie based on a splashy eruption of cultural populism -- Hillbilly Elegy – and thinking it'll be a prestige play. At least there's a kind of so-bad-it's-good camp glory in that one: a poverty cosplay directed by a lifelong celebrity who has lived in Greenwich for thirty years. This movie could be equally tone deaf. I've heard one too many people say Mark Boal is a prick. And I once saw Noah Centineo through an old boss's glass door: dude was beautiful, and for the full hour of their meeting, he took notes furiously. I fucking love actors.
HBO, Jason Blum, and Andrew Ross Sorkin are developing a movie too. Does everybody know Andrew Ross Sorkin? If not, he's a very smart boy-man who is a reporter on Business and who has his name in the credits of Billions. Not related to Aaron, but not-not, you know? Well, I feel like for this movie to have any chance of being good, it needs to be the opposite of Billions. I thought Jason Blum would feel the same. We’ll see who directs.
MGM/De Luca & Ben Mezrich's plan seems premised on a misunderstanding: that they – the producer and book author behind The Social Network -- are making a spiritual sequel to their beloved movie. Mezrich’s book on GameStop, the basis for the new film, will be called The Anti-Social Network. De Luca now runs a studio and spends liberally on projects that harken back to earlier hits (not just here, but there’s the PTA movie too, which, from what I gather, is like a hybrid of Boogie Nights and Magnolia). Perhaps having been declined by Sorkin & Fincher, the writer and director who made their movie really good, De Luca and Mezrich have attempted to get the rest of the back-up band back together… so the motherfucking Winklevii will produce. “YES.” IN. THE. ROOM! I don't get how the true stories compare, except that they both involve computers: One geek's rise to power is absolutely a movie; but a widely distributed group of geeks having a good time in a corner of the internet who wind up going viral is an episode of Reply All. Maybe there’s a glimmer of genuine creative interest here. I imagine the Winklevii might understand how the Redditors feel: gypped. I'd watch if they directed and had final cut.
And now we move from the self-serious packages to the openly sleazy… There's a project with a veteran writer set up at a studio that hasn't hit the trades. This writer, who I met once, is in his 40s. He joked with me that sleeping with someone under 20 "counted twice in [his] book."
Speaking of likely sex criminals, Brett Ratner has the life rights of the guy who founded the board. I feel like Ratner and the Winklevii will both try casting Armie.
Honestly, I feel gross having written all that – and not just about those last two projects. It’s because I really don’t want to dunk on people who are trying to make movies. I swear I don’t. But the attention of powerful people is a precious resource required for any movie to be made, and this week, a lot of it went into this shit.
And that takes away oxygen from other movies at a moment when things feel precarious, especially on the film side. I can’t help but wonder if this frenzy reflects a kind of panic: If you’ve got greenlight power but are feeling the same anxiety I do, maybe closing your eyes and jumping on a viral bandwagon seems like your best bet. As the guys of r/WallStreetBets said, YOLO GAMESTOP.
Hollywood Forever Y’all,
Max
P.S. This seems cool.