The GameStop trade war will make its way to the silver screen following MGM's acquisition of the rights to the latest book proposal from Ben Mezrich.
According to Deadline, MGM has recently acquired the rights to the New York Times best-selling author’s newest book, The Antisocial Network. It will chronicle how a group of gamers and amateur investors on the subreddit r/wallstreetbets took on Wall Street professional traders when they attempted to short GameStop stock.
Mezrich and his literary reps took the book proposal to market in the same week the trade war began. MGM fought off competitive offers from other studios to snap up the rights to The Antisocial Network by Friday night last week.
As the book only goes out to publishers for auction in February, we do not yet know how the book (and therefore the film) will retell the trade war.
Academy Award-nominee Aaron Ryder of RPC will produce the film, and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss will exec produce the film adaptation through their Winklevoss Pictures production company.
Ben Mezrich is the only non-fiction author who has had two adaptations of their work open at #1 in the box office. The first was 21, a heist movie adaptation of Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions.
This new project will reunite Mezrich with Michael DeLuca, who has just signed a first-look movie deal with MGM. DeLuca produced the second, far more successful adaptation of Mezrich's work that topped the box office. David Fincher’s award-winning movie The Social Network was an adaptation of Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal which explored how Mark Zuckerberg and his friends developed one of the most popular social networks on the planet.
Elsewhere, Mezrich’s follow-up to The Accidental Billionaires, Bitcoin Billionaires, is currently being made into a movie by the Winklevoss twins and production company Stampede Ventures.
