The film and book are both based off the true story of the 2021 GameStop short squeeze, in which several hedge fund managers (D'Onofrio, Offerman, Rogen) bet against GameStop stocks in the hopes of making more profit off their investments by shorting those stocks. A group of investors from the subreddit r/wallstreetbets began to buy multiple shares in GameStop, causing the shares to skyrocket and a depletion in revenue for the hedge funds. At the center of it is Keith Gill (Dano), whose analyses of the stocks influenced other small investors to buy into GameStop.
This film provides examples of:
- And Starring: Seth Rogen gets the “and” credit despite the cast being listed alphabetically, which would have put him between Anthony Ramos and Sebastian Stan.
- Annoying Younger Sibling: Kevin is this to Keith, as he frequently borrows his car to do DoorDash deliveries without Keith's permission, and he also trolls his brother on Reddit under the username "Ballz".
- Arc Words: "I just like the stock" - Keith's ultimate reasoning for buying into GameStop, which becomes a repeated phrase among his followers, and also is among his closing statement during his testimony at the end. His followers cheer upon hearing him say it.
- Dramatization: The film is based on real events of 2020-2021, and Keith Gill and the Wall Street people are Historical Domain Characters. The various individual investors are invented characters meant to represent some of those who took part in the real r/wallstreetbets uprising.
- Brick Joke: Marcos jokingly does the "Savage" dance for his boss Brad in the beginning when Brad asks him to make TikTok videos for the company (in exchange for ten hours' pay). Marcos does this again at the end to taunt Brad since he cannot directly fire him after he talks back to Brad.
- Gone Horribly Right: Keith invests in GameStop because he thinks it's undervalued and the stock has potential to go up in price. The price does go up far beyond what he expected, but it also kicks off a meme-driven social movement that both creates and destroys fortunes.
- Hauled Before A Senate Subcommittee: In the last act of the film, Keith, Gabe, Ken, and Vlad are all subpoenaed by the House of Representatives to testify about the short squeeze.
- Hypocritical Humor: Brad constantly has to remind Marcos to keep his face mask on since the pandemic is still ongoing. When Marcos asks him if he knows what a short squeeze is, Brad walks up to his face and lowers his own mask to ask if it's a sex thing.
- I Need a Freaking Drink: After Jenny regrets not cashing out before Wall Street puts an end to buying the GameStop shares, she grabs a glass of champagne from a stewardess. When Jenny explains her situation, the stewardess says she will get her something stronger.
- Laser-Guided Karma: The ending text states that Robinhood had the worst public debut for an app and that it is now worth less than what it originally was, making its founders lose their billionaire status. This is after Vlad Tenev (one of the founders of the app) helped put a stop to buying GameStop shares. Meanwhile, Gabe Plotkin's company Melvin Capital was ultimately put out of business.
- Mass "Oh, Crap!": Both r/wallstreetbets being shut down and Robinhood disabling the buy button for GME causes all of the small investors to panic, which was the point. Enough people are rattled into selling their stock to tank the investments of those that held: GME drops to about a third of its peak value (which admittedly is still about forty times higher than its price at the start of the film).
- Screw the Money, This Is Personal!: Towards the middle of the film, the short squeeze has mostly stopped being about investing in GameStop for many characters, and has become about revenge against Wall Street for the string of financial crises in the early 21st century. Riri recounts how her father, general manager of a grocery store, was ruined by so-called "vulture capitalists", i.e. a hedge fund that bought the chain, stripped its assets, and then declared bankruptcy, erasing his pension.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Gabe Plotkin gets bailed out of the failing short by Ken Griffin's firm (for the moment), and the duo go to work on putting down the retail investor uprising: Reddit is made to lock r/Wallstreetbets, Robinhood is forced to turn off the "Buy" button on GME, and it's strongly implied they squeezed MassMutual to make them fire Keith for accidentally starting the whole thing.
- Self-Made Lie: When the main cast are Hauled Before A Senate Subcommittee at the end of the film, Gabe Plotkin, the CEO of Melvin Capital, is coached by his assistants to present himself as a self-made man: for example, leaving out the part that his "middle-class" father was a grocery store chain executive who paid for him to go to Northwestern. This is contrasted directly with main protagonist Keith Gill, the personal finance YouTube streamer who accidentally started the run on GameStop stock, whose parents are a trucker and a nurse, and who was the first in his family to go to college.
- Stock Footage: The members of Congress on the committee are all footage from the real-life hearings, with the actors repeating the lines that their characters historically said.
- Title Drop: The title comes from a slang term among Wall Street investment firms for "retail investors", i.e. regular people trading individual stocks. It's mentioned and explained by Harmony around the middle of the film.
- Video Call Fail: During his Congressional testimony, Gabe Plotkin gets embarrassed by his audio glitching out: his opening remarks go completely unheard, and he can't seem to hear the Congressman trying to tell him that he's on mute.
- Villainy-Free Villain: Shorting stocks is not illegal, it's just an investment mechanism that is financially out of reach of all but the very wealthy. Neither, technically, is getting Keith fired: at best Keith could maybe sue Plotkin and Griffin for tortious interference with his employment contract (if he even has one: most US workers don't). So the film portrays Plotkin, Griffin, Tenev, and Baiju as out-of-touch jerks who are trying to get even richer.
- "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The last scene shows clips of the main characters now having a greater net worth than before (except for Jenny, who is still holding onto her shares), along with some text regarding the fate of the hedge fund managers, as well as Keith Gill, who has since retreated from public life after the film's events.
