Dumb Money: All-Star cast bringing in the big laughs and big bucks.
Dumb Money is the ultimate David vs. Goliath tale, based on the real-life story of everyday people who flipped the script on Wall Street and got rich by turning GameStop (the bricks and mortar video game store) into the world's hottest company.
The film's title is a common term that typically refers to individual investors and uninformed outsiders. Keith Gill, played by Paul Dano, flips that term on its head as an amateur trader and low-level financial analyst at a Massachusetts insurance company, when he makes the risky decision to bet his life savings on GameStop. Gill goes one step further though, uploading YouTube videos from his basement to his channel Roaring Kitty, convincing thousands of others to do the same while his patient wife Caroline, played by Shailene Woodley, is upstairs with their baby daughter.
Beyond the memes and finance-bro talk of Reddit threads, the class differences shown throughout the film provide a deeper context for why some traders were willing to follow the advice of a cat T-shirt wearing stranger on YouTube. Set amid the pandemic, those who weren't able to escape quarantine had to deal with job loss, financial insecurity, and debt—a combination that had the characters in Dumb Money even more primed to 'eat the rich', even if it meant risking their life savings.
Unlike The Big Short (2015), which focused on major players in the 2008 financial crisis, Dumb Money takes us into the lives of small investors, worshipping the words of Roaring Kitty. America Ferrera plays Jenny, a sympathetic nurse with two children, a mortgage and credit card debt. Pete Davidson, with impeccable satiric delivery, plays Keith's brother, who is not the smart one. While Seth Rogan plays Gabe Plotkin, the Goliath of the story who betted against the success of GameStop.
Director Craig Gillespie, best known for I, Tonya, told PEOPLE that he came to the subject of Dumb Money organically during the pandemic, watching his son take part in the GameStop phenomenon. The very story he would bring to the big screen just two years later.
Cash in on Dumb Money in cinemas from October 26.