The trailer for the highly anticipated documentary Gamestop: Rise of the Players was released today, revealing that the film will be released in theaters on January 28, 2022. The film is set to depict the details of the now-infamous GameStop stock incident that occurred last year, with the synopsis reading:
“In January 2021, the brick-and-mortar video game retailer GameStop had been the top story on every news network in the country. Its stock had risen over 2500% amidst a wild flurry of volatility, despite no new news coming out of the company. The run was fueled by an epic “short squeeze” on a handful of billion-dollar hedge fund behemoths, netting online investors millions and costing the hedge funds tens-of-billions of dollars in the process. But this wasn’t just a run on a stock. This was a battle that has been brewing for years. It’s a David and Goliath story of a band of contrarians who bucked conventional wisdom to bet on themselves, their own research, and a business that Wall Street had given up on.”
It will go into detail about this David and Goliath fight between r/WallStreetBets, an at the time popular Reddit forum, and the Wall Street workers who deemed GameStop to be obsolete, resulting in the stock skyrocketing. This also caused an internal investigation into the activities done by those same Wall Street workers to be launched, confronting many of the issues of Wall Street that many have been rallying against for years.
Jonah Tulis discussed the significance of this event, highlighting his desire to make the film in order to tell the whole story of this phenomenon:
“There was a greater story here with compelling people behind-the-scenes changing the world. But still the prospect of making a film about this was a longshot. For me, every documentary I make needs to feel like a “campfire” story, one told by the people who lived it, in the moment - no narrators or pundits giving the basic overview. I want to hear from the people who lived it. This group of ordinary people who all banded together, believed in themselves – they were the story I wanted to tell. But during the madness nearly a dozen separate projects were announced on the subject. Some will be made, some won’t. I didn’t relish in this competition but with the trust of our film’s subjects, we persevered. It was tough. And it is with that trust that this movie was made. Trust between me and the subjects to tell their story and tell it right all the while doing justice to the greater story and this world-changing event.”
The film is produced by Blake J. Harris, Dan Braun, and Josh Braun through Submarine Entertainment. Check out the film's poster and trailer below:
