Inside Stathamism, the New Film About the Reddit Cult That Worshiped Jason Statham

Time Business News

2 days ago

By Rossmen Evans
There was a Reddit cult. It called itself Stathamism. It worshipped Jason Statham's character in Crank. It believed that living like Chev Chelios was the only way to be truly alive.
That's not a joke.
Back in 2019, a user who went by 'Opal' created the subreddit r/stathamism that would become ground zero for one of the weirdest digital rabbit holes the internet has ever seen. The basic idea? Reality was fake, and the only way to stay 'awake' inside it was to keep your adrenaline up at all times. Just like in the movie Crank.
The subreddit looked like a joke at first. Users shared memes, screenshots, and video clips. But things started getting serious fast. People began reenacting scenes from Crank. Public stunts. Fights. Car chases. Someone posted a GoPro video of themselves jumping from a roof onto a moving truck. One thread casually discussed heart defibrillators as 'ritual tools.'
By the time Reddit took the community down in 2023, there were multiple hospitalizations tied to it. Some were ruled accidental. At least one death was left open by the police. The phrase 'performance suicide' started popping up in reports. Reddit wiped the subreddit. There is little to no information left on the existence of this group. But you know how that goes. Screenshots live forever.
Now, two filmmakers — Caden Ahmad and Aryan Chaudhari — are turning the whole mess into a movie. The film is currently in production and is already gaining traction with people who were on Reddit at the time and remember the cult before it got decimated from the internet.
'I thought it was fake at first,' Caden says. 'Then I found a PDF called The Crank Testament. That was when I realized this was something deeper than internet trolling.'
The film blends real archival Reddit content, surreal dramatizations, and the kind of grainy, brain-melting intensity that feels pulled straight from the internet's underbelly. It leans heavily into dark comedy, using absurdity as a scalpel to dissect how easily people fall into belief systems built on spectacle and chaos. At its core, Stathamism is Caden and Aryan's sharp critique of America's obsession with true crime, cult narratives, and the way we glamorize extremism when it's packaged like entertainment. The result is as disturbing as it is ridiculous — and that's entirely the point.
'We wanted to explore what happens when irony stops being ironic,' Aryan explains. 'People throw themselves into movements all the time. This one just happened to worship a guy who needs to stay pumped full of adrenaline or die.'
Even though the subreddit is gone, echoes of Stathamism still bounce around online. Some YouTube comments mention 'Chev Ascension.' A deleted TikTok audio featuring a slowed down version of the Crank theme was tagged with 'stathamloop.' There are even rumors that an underground Discord server still exists, but no one's been able to verify it.
At its core, Stathamism is about how the internet makes anything believable. Even worshipping Jason Statham. Especially worshipping Jason Statham.
The film does not answer all your questions. It just asks weirder ones. And honestly, that's probably for the best.
Links: https://seedandspark.com/fund/stathamism#story
TIME BUSINESS NEWS