![]() As GameStop starts its ascent, drawing eye-rolling dismissals from analysts and pundits, Alzmann and twentysomething maverick Joe Fonicello draft a report pegging GameStop’s true share price at $169. The trucking-company strategist headed up the crowdsourced due-diligence effort that keeps the movie’s heroes at the casino table when the big scores start coming in. The movie instead reveals that the smart money in all of this didn’t come from folks like Gabe Plotkin, the short seller whose hedge fund lost billions of dollars betting against GameStop and other stocks. The discussion of how GameStop was seen by the investment community feels much like the scene from Moneyball where a room full of baseball scouts can’t articulate why a certain player is any good, beyond “He looks like a good player.” GameStop was seen as a dinosaur awaiting a meteor strike, because someone slapped the brick-and-mortar business with the “Blockbuster 2.0” label, and it got repeated until it was taken as empirical fact. The buildup is simple: Professional investors had a terrible opinion of GameStop, battering its stock price with confirmation bias more than analysis. ![]() Nor does the film dwell on criticisms of capitalism, manipulated markets, or any of the grudging conspiracy theories that bubbled up when online brokerages curbed trading. They’re smart enough to not bog the audience down in the concepts of short-selling, and they don’t build their narration on horse-race coverage of the stock itself. ![]() In this case, Tulis and Harris aren’t out to tell the definitive story of how GameStop’s share price went from $3.25 in August 2020 to $325 the following January. GameStop: Rise of the Players is like one of those sports movies that’s great because it isn’t about sports. Harris (who made Console Wars for Paramount Plus in 2020) have finally reshaped the story in a way that gives us folks worth cheering for. One year after the GameStop short squeeze, which involved Reddit bros, dank memes, hedge-fund billionaires, and congressional hearings, Tulis and producer Blake J. The documentary’s final lines unabashedly call these nine investors “heroes,” which is a bold label for a group whose struggle consists of making a whole lot of money. The “heroes” of GameStop: Rise of the Players imagined in video game cutscenes, clockwise from top left: Rod Alzmann, Justin Dopierala, Farris Husseini, and Dmitry Kozin. And Jenn Kruza’s indestructible smile is validated after she holds onto her GameStop shares long enough to make a huge profit, even while she’s navigating chemotherapy treatment with no health insurance. Rigoberto Alcaraz, whose parents immigrated from Mexico to Batavia, Illinois, comes through with a Horatio Alger story for the ages. Among them is Justin Dopierala, a dairyland money manager who makes millionaires out of nurses and welders. The eventual coda that answers that question is well worth the 90 minutes director Jonah Tulis spends introducing and explaining Rise of the Players’ round-hearted stars. The obvious viewer question is “How did these folks make out once the GameStop story stopped being national news?” These nine are the “OG Diamond Hands” who first invested in the beleaguered game retailer one year ago, then rode those holdings through a white-knuckle market anomaly that shot the share price damn near to Neptune. It becomes clear that Rise of the Players is going in that direction about halfway through, after it has introduced nine ordinary people who aren’t just the good guys of this story, they’re the best kinds of subjects a documentarian could want. You know the type - the kind of story that’s largely an oral history, with a feel-good climax that comes in a few lines of text, over a montage of smiles and laughter, right at the end of the film. The new GameStop documentary Rise of the Players is a coda movie.
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