'Artificial' Neon The Social Reckoning had a tough time making noise at the box office in its opening weekend, spurring debate about the prospects for a spate of 2026 titles examining the tech sphere.
Aaron Sorkin‘s follow-up to director David Fincher’s acclaimed 2010 hit The Social Network, for which Sorkin nabbed the Oscar for adapted screenplay, grossed a disappointing $5.5 million domestically, below even the soft initial projections that distributor Sony Pictures had set for the wide release of the $30 million-budgeted film. While the 2010 movie starred Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in the story of the platform’s early days, The Social Reckoning replaced Eisenberg with Jeremy Strong as the CEO. Mikey Madison stars as a Facebook staffer who teams up with a journalist (Jeremy Allen White) to expose dark truths.
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After a great box office run with a global cume of $224 million, The Social Network continues to be heralded as a masterpiece of its era. But it’s clear that much about the world has changed since that time. While the impact of technology — and the billionaires who run such companies — on American lives has never been more evident, it remains to be seen whether today’s Hollywood takes can successfully capture what it is that makes this sphere such fodder for conversation and discussion.
The Social Network dove into the world of Facebook “at a time when people had a much more emotional connection to the platform,” Rentrak’s Paul Dergarabedian tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Quite frankly, Facebook was a much sexier subject in 2010. Today, it’s become more of a utility, and the story being told in The Social Reckoning is much different and arguably more challenging from a commercial standpoint. Combine that with the mixed reviews, and you have some significant headwinds in an already competitive theatrical marketplace.”
Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison in The Social Reckoning. Sony Pictures Clearly, tech figures have an outsized role in everyday lives, as the often polarizing personalities generate ire and debate. But some recent social media posts surrounding the release of The Social Reckoning, which holds a middling 55 percent critics approval on Rotten Tomatoes, have suggested that the dealings of self-absorbed billionaires amid the public’s fear of AI and tech figures’ political sway are not the stories that audiences might see as particularly escapist in this challenging cultural moment.
“In the 16 years since The Social Network, the story became one of corporate misbehavior,” David A. Gross, who runs the box office newsletter FranchiseRe, tells THR about such films not always feeling especially cinematic or relatable. “Public sentiment has soured, and audience interest has declined. The story lost its edge.”
Also debuting in theaters over the weekend was Alex Gibney’s Elon Musk-focused documentary Musk, with the nearly four-hour feature collecting $69,321 from four screens to rank as the frame’s second-best average per screen. Next weekend sees the arrival of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s buzzy three-hour Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything. Meanwhile, Neon has set Luca Guadagnino‘s Artificial for a December release after the film, starring Andrew Garfield as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, was shelved by Amazon earlier this year.
A scene from Musk. Courtesy of the Venice Film Festival Unlike the situation with The Social Reckoning, reviews for Artificial, You Can See Everything and Musk have been stellar. While their collective impact at the box office is still uncertain, their fates will likely improve if they continue building awards buzz, which is something that may be eluding Sorkin’s film at this point.
“The rich and powerful have always been irresistible media fare, so it seems pretty obvious why we’re seeing so many films about tech billionaires right now: They’re our new overlords,” quips Allison de Fren, Occidental College media arts and culture professor and a Science Fiction Research Association award winner. “Although neither Musk nor Zuckerberg strikes me as a particularly charismatic character, what’s fascinating is the extraordinary, often invisible influence they wield over our everyday lives.”
Hollywood and Silicon Valley continue to share complex connections, with Amazon’s decision to drop Artificial having come months after the tech giant announced a major partnership with OpenAI, the subject of the blistering film. A recent example of the continued commingling came last week with the news that tech entrepreneur and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs — who was once Disney’s largest shareholder after the passing of husband Steve Jobs — has joined the board of the recently formed Skydance Corporation, whose founder, David Ellison, is the son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison.
“The worlds of Hollywood and big tech have become increasingly intertwined and synonymous, in line with the flows of funding, ownership and influence that come with ever greater convergence,” says Ithaca College professor of screen studies Andrew Utterson. “The hope is that filmmakers continue to tell the tech-focused stories that matter without undue influence from powerful individuals and corporate entities alike.”
Indeed, the soft turnout for The Social Reckoning might remain more representative of its particular focus than whether tech stories can captivate on the big screen.
“There’s a sense in which concerns about misinformation feel like yesterday’s news,” says Gabriel Rossman, an economic sociology professor at UCLA. “But obviously, people are very interested in AI, and they’re interested from various perspectives. So, the outlier of these movies [as a potential breakout] would be [Artificial, given that] Altman is arguably one of the most important human beings alive right now.”
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