The financial drama that began with a bunch of redditors pumping GameStop stock by about 1,700% had a short cooldown period as markets took a breather over the weekend. However, entertainment doesn’t take such breaks as it’s now been confirmed that The Antisocial Network film will be a reality.
The movie will be based on a book not yet written by famed author Ben Mezrich, who in the past has published other lauded non-fiction gems like Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions or The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal, both of which were adapted to hit movies like 21 and the even more successful The Social Network.
Confirmation for the movie was broken by Deadline, which revealed that MGM acquired the rights to the film after Mezrich started pitching the idea for the book a few days ago and by Friday he’d already clinched book and film deals for The Antisocial Network. Despite only being a week old, the story now involves players as varied as Reddit, GameStop, RobinHood and Elon Musk, as well as unfancied assets like Dogecoin, AMC Theatres, Blockbuster, Nokia, all of which saw dramatic prices increase largely in part due to coordinated efforts form the WallStreetBets subreddit.
Mezrich had already floated the idea for a “sequel” to The Social Network in early December, with a Twitter user particularly suggesting the title The Antisocial Network. Though the now in-development book and movie are certainly not sequels to the Facebook drama, they do follow a similar ethos, with MGM aiming to pair up Mezrich again with The Social Network producer Michael DeLuca.
The author first joked around the idea of a ragtag band of redditors tackling Wall Street as a pretty good movie pitch on January 27, so just like the WallStreetBets story, the whole process took less than a week. Mezrich’s most recent work includes Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption and writing an entire episode for Showtime’s Billions, so few would second guess his finance expertise to bring Reddit and GameStop over to the big screen after spending nearly two decades dedicated to writing such stories.
The Social Network, which followed a bunch of college students in many ways not too different from the Reddit day traders, just turned 10 years old last year, and after such a long time the film has aged beautifully as an early showcase of just how big and influential Facebook would become. As markets open today, only time will tell how the GameStop story will unfold and how big The Antisocial Network really turns out to be.
Source: Deadline