“The Social Reckoning”, Aaron Sorkin’s 2026 sequel to his 2010 film “The Social Network,” follows the true story of “The Facebook Files,” The Wall Street Journal’s exposé uncovering Facebook’s mass violations of user privacy agreements.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is played by Jeremy Strong but takes a backseat to co-stars Jeremy Allen White (playing Wall Street reporter Jeff Horwitz) and Mikey Madison (playing Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen).
Released Oct. 9, the Sony production earned about $5.5 million during its debut weekend, significantly underperforming its $7 million to $8 million projections.
After an even poorer performance at the box office the next weekend, earning a mere $1.4 million, Sony pulled the movie from nearly 2,000 theaters, leaving only 619 theaters showing the film.
Given the movie ran on a $30 million budget, the underperformance was a cosmic-sized flop. According to critics, the film’s appalling lack of acceptance was in part due to Sorkin’s lack of directing ability.
I sure wish I had $30 million to throw around on an experimental exposé art piece. I guess I should be glad I don’t have tens of millions of dollars of disappointment to reckon with.
The exposé centers on a 2021 scandal in which The Wall Street Journal found certain Facebook apps were leaking tens of millions of users’ private identification information to at least 25 advertising firms, violating Facebook’s user privacy policies.
The ensuing anger from users feels justified to me.
Also sounds like great fodder for a movie plot. Apparently, Sorkin agreed.
Every good, expensive Hollywood movie flop interlaces a few strands of drama, and “The Social Reckoning” is no different. Sorkin’s lack of directing experience and the box-office failure are just the tip of the iceberg.
The writer-director suffered backlash for his inaccurate depiction of Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg in his 2010 film “The Social Network” after he was portrayed as a highly ambitious, mildly arrogant and success-hungry genius. Audiences were divided on whether this was their experience of his character.
Sorkin shared with The Hollywood Reporter the mixed feedback he received from “The Social Network,” saying, “If you were a little bit older, you saw it as a cautionary tale, which is what it was intended to be. If you were a little bit younger, surprisingly, you saw it as an inspirational story . . . ‘Oh wow, I can drop out of school and have an idea and be a billionaire.’”
Huh. Apparently, though some audiences read Zuckerberg’s ambition as arrogant, others believed it to be aspirational and empowering.
Maybe that’s the nature of ambition. Maybe by default it’s a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure. Maybe on its own it’s too ambiguous to be wholly good or wholly bad. Maybe it’s what you do with ambition that makes it good or bad, constructive or destructive.
“I like writing about heroes who don’t have supernatural powers, heroes who don’t wear capes. I like giving an audience the feeling that that capability is inside all of us,” Sorkin said at a Q&A at Columbia University promoting the 2026 film.
What exactly does Sorkin want us to know is inside us? The capability for what? For the virtuous and aspirational strand of ambition younger generations saw or the vicious and ominous strand older generations saw? Maybe both.
Sorkin says of Zuckerberg, “But in dramatist terms, he’s not a villain. He’s an antihero. A villain has bad intentions. They want the money, they want revenge, that kind of thing. An antihero: the intentions are good: ‘I want to connect everybody in the world.’ But the way an antihero goes about doing it, the decisions they ultimately make are bad.”
Maybe an anti-hero — and not a villain — is what you become when you practice the kind of ambition Zuckerberg did.
“What Hollywood has done occasionally, not in the beginning, but certainly since the ’50s and the ’60s, is played its part in speaking truth to power,” Sony CEO Tom Rothman said. “That’s what this film does, and that’s why we’re proud of it.”
OK, so the film plays two roles. It not only depicts an antihero who models a version of ambition audiences are hesitant to accept, but it also supposedly aims to shed light on Big Tech’s ethically questionable practices.
As much as I understand the fact that the movie’s premise is based on an exposé, I doubt that “transparency” or “truth” are included in the top 5 core values of the Hollywood movie-making culture at large.
I also doubt that whatever Hollywood filmmaker mogul conference room exists has a shiny gold-framed mission statement hanging on the wall that reads “Out of the goodness of our hearts and our pure love for mankind, we exist to speak truth to the forces that be.” (The fine print at the bottom would read something like, “We reserve the right to exclude ourselves from ‘the forces that be’”).
As much as “The Social Reckoning” is fraught with ethical ambiguity, it’s worth exploring the questions “What kind of ambition is at play here?” and “How is it shaping me?” If not for this reflection, you may find yourself the subject of a biting exposé.
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