CNN is making a documentary about the fall of HQ Trivia

Which of these has greenlit a documentary about HQ Trivia?

If you read the headline and correctly chose CNN, congratulations! You’ve won some internet points, I guess.

An untitled documentary about the trivia app that everyone seemed to be playing a few years ago is scheduled for a 2023 release. As Deadline reports, CNN has lined up a director, Salima Koroma (Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street). 

HQ Trivia, which was built by the creators of Vine, debuted in August 2017 and it initially ran two live trivia games per day. The concept was pretty simple. Answer several questions correctly in a row and you’d split the prize pot. Along with the chance to win cash through a mobile app, charismatic main host Scott Rogowsky helped turn HQ Trivia into a phenomenon. At one point, more than 2.3 million people were playing the game simultaneously.

The good times didn’t last, however. Co-founder Colin Kroll died in 2018, while Rogowsky departed in 2019 to host a baseball show on DAZN. The app ran out of money in early 2020 and shut down, though it returned a month later thanks to the help of an anonymous investor.

HQ Trivia is still around, though it now runs just one game per week. The latest edition had a commendable 21,000 players. However, at $1,500, the prize was a far cry from the $300,000 the app offered at one point when Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was a guest host.

The Ringer also told the story of the app in a podcast called Boom/Bust: The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia. A CNN spokesperson told Engadget that the documentary is being developed independently.

It also emerged during Warner Bros. Discovery’s upfront presentation that Eva Longoria: Searching for Mexico is moving to CNN. The docuseries was initially a CNN+ exclusive, but the high-profile streaming service was killed less than a month after its debut.

Update 5/18 3:07PM ET: Clarifying that the documentary is being developed independently and that it’s not based on The Ringer’s podcast.