‘Dumb Money,’ a Movie Poking Fun at Wall Street Big Money, Was Made by Blackstone CEO’s Son

A new movie lampooning some of Wall Street’s biggest names had an inside source.

Dumb Money, set to be released on Sept. 29, tells the true David-and-Goliath story of how regular folks in online forums on Reddit “flipped the script on Wall Street” in January 2021 by buying up shares of GameStop stock that investors had been betting against, setting off a market frenzy. 

The movie particularly aims its digs at some bold-face Wall Street names, including Gabe Plotkin, founder and CEO of Melvin Capital Management, which lost billions in the grass-roots attack; Citadel’s Kenneth Griffin; and "hedge fund king" and New York Mets owner Steven Cohen.

Behind the lampooning of some of the big guns on the Street is the son of a big gun on the Street: Teddy Schwarzman.

Producer Schwarzman's father is Stephen Schwarzman, the co-founder and CEO of Blackstone Group, one of the world's leading investment firms, which manages roughly $1 trillion in assets.

In fact, the younger Schwarzman is the reason the $30 million film even exists, The New York Times reported. After Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer backed out of the film, Schwarzman and his production company Black Bear Pictures made a last-minute investment, Rebecca (Dana) Angelo and Lauren Schuker Blum, former Wall Street Journal reporters who wrote and served as executive producers for the movie, told the Times.

“When no one else believed in this film, Teddy came in pretty heroically,” Blum said.

Angelo is married to Jesse Angelo, the former president of news and entertainment at Vice Media and a former executive editor of the New York Post.

The movie, directed by I, Tonya's Craig Gillespie, is based on Ben Mezric’s 2021 book, The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees. The book chronicles the GameStop stock frenzy.

It stars Paul Dano, Pete Davidson, Vincent D'Onofrio and America Ferrera, alongside other big names, including Seth Rogen, who plays Plotkin.