The Box Office Reckoning
🔗 Why ‘Social Reckoning’ Went Silent as More Tech Movies Face Box Office Test • THR
On one hand, you can see why Sony would want to go back to the Facebook well/wall. The Social Network opened with $22M, won three Oscars and countless other awards on its way to pulling in $224M at the global box office. And that was in 2010 numbers. Adjusted for 2026 dollars, the box office looks more like $350M. Unfortunately, The Social Reckoning is no Social Network:
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.
$5.5M. It's not a Digger-level disaster, but only because Sony wisely cut the already fairly small budget of $40M for the first film (and again, that was in 2010 money). The reality here was that this movie was never likely to be a big performer at the box office. From the title to the trailer,1 it always just sort of felt like this was set up to be re-heated leftovers.
To be fair, the reviews have been a bit more generous than I would have guessed from that trailer, but they're still middling at best – certainly not the glowing reviews the first film got. How much of that can be chalked up to Sorkin directing this one versus just writing it (which which he won one of those Oscars)? Probably a decent amount. But more so it would seem that his vendetta against Facebook/Meta in recent years (following the success of the first film) was always going to make this follow-up too preachy in a very Sorkin-style.
That's fine, it's art after all. But again, it's also not a huge surprise no one really wants to see that movie – at least not in theaters. This clearly – clearly – should have been a movie that went right to streaming. That's easy to say in hindsight, of course. But it would have been easy to say before that too. In the 16 years since the first film, the world has changed a lot. Yes, Meta is still in court over the various social disasters that Facebook and later Instagram wrought – and they're having to settle those cases for billions lest they lose and potentially have to pay trillions. But that just doesn't feel like a movie anyone wants to watch and relive.
That makes Artificial – aka, the OpenAI movie – far more of a successor to The Social Network, even if only spiritually. And that mixed with the thus far glowing reviews should lead to far more box office (and perhaps awards) success.
There was some concern when Amazon dumped the already-completed film that it was a signal that it wasn't any good, but it may have actually been the opposite signal: it was too good. And that was a problem for Amazon's fresh $50B investment into the subject of the movie...
Anyway, a more interesting test for the Tech Villain anthology hitting theaters this Fall will be You Can See Everything and Musk – because the former is 3 hours long and the latter 4 hours. Those lengths typically don't point to huge box offices – The Odyssey not withstanding, though You Can See Everything is actually longer, yes, longer than one of the most famous stories about length of time – but both also have very strong reviews and early buzz. We'll see. Or we won't!
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 The Social Reckoning? Come on, either go all-in with a title like The Social Nightmare or The Social Disaster or do something more clever – The Antisocial Network... This title just sounds generic. ↩