The backlash of technology is now seen in cinemas

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Between The Social Reckoning, You Can See Everything, Musk and Artificial, filmmakers are using big tech.

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is a reporter who focuses on film, television and pop culture. Prior to The Verge, he spent nearly five years writing about comic books, work, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo.

While movies about disruptive tech founders are nothing new, 2026 has been unusually full of features that take a very critical look at how our reality is being reshaped in Silicon Valley. Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning presents Mark Zuckerberg as a robotic villain whose ambitions destabilize society. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's You Can See Everything paints a damning portrait of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, as she prepares for her ongoing stint in prison. After years of widespread fame as a visionary, you can see how the larger narrative surrounding Elon Musk has changed in projects like Alex Gibney's documentary Musk. And while Luca Guadagnino's "Artificial" is a dark comedy, it's also a character study that makes Sam Altman look like a manipulative sociopath.

Although some of these films are fictional dramas, each emerges from a wealth of critical reporting that makes their subjects less palatable. The characters, you get the sense that these filmmakers are trying to tell stories that are supposed to resonate with audiences whose views on big tech have long since faded. But it also seems that some of Hollywood's biggest studios are finally embracing the idea that tech backlash isn't going away anytime soon.

Especially when you compare them to classics like The Social Network, the latest wave of power-struggle dramas in Silicon Valley have been far less sympathetic to their main characters. David Fincher's 2010 film starring Jesse Eisenberg portrayed Zuckerberg as a complex and flawed scientist, but The Social Reckoning builds its story around the idea that the Facebook boss/meta-man, obsessed with growth, is an existential threat to democracy. Focusing on the allegations made by whistleblower Francis Haugen, the film could highlight Zuckerberg's public evolution into a powerful executive who wields authoritarian control over his multibillion-dollar social media empire.

What The Social Reckoning lacks in timeliness (the Wall Street Journal began reporting on Haugen's warnings in 2021) and stylistic flair, it makes up for in the way Facebook/Meta's past internal decisions are linked to events. Scenes from the film, which examine Instagram's negative effects on teen mental health and the relationship between Facebook's algorithm and the spread of misinformation, seem to speak directly to today's concerns about meta's impact on people's lives. Similarly, Gibney Musk's documentary serves as both a backstory to the xAI/SpaceX boss and an investigation into why people were always willing to allow Musk to gain so much power in governments around the world.

Musk's response to Gibney's film has been telling. X has banned the feature from being promoted on the platform, and Musk - a self-proclaimed "free speech fanatic" - has threatened to take legal action against Gibney for producing a "hit piece". It wasn't at all surprising to see Musk personally vilify a project that was negative about him, but Musk's ads were initially absent on other social media platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

Although subsidiaries Meta and YouTube eventually reversed their decisions, TikTok has stuck to its guns—notable given the company's indirect ties to the Trump administration through Skydance Corporation CEO David Ellison. David's father - Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison - is a longtime supporter of Donald Trump and an American billionaire who led the consortium of investors that bought Tik Tok's US business late last year. Ellison has reportedly promised Gibney that The Mask will air on HBO (now part of Skydance) next January. The film is currently playing in select theaters, but it's hard to argue that it hasn't had to deal with an unusual amount of outside interference in the weeks leading up to its release.

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Guadagnino's Artificial — which was originally slated to be published by Amazon — also faced unexpected marketing challenges this year. The streaming giant pulled out of its film distribution deal last June, just months after announcing a $50 billion investment in OpenAI. All of this has made Amazon and other studios financially involved with AI companies look like they may be cooling the idea of releasing projects critical of the technology's creators. Now that Artificial has started screening and people are realizing how Altman works, it's easy to see why Amazon didn't want to attach its name. More than anything else, that decision may be what convinces people that Artificial will be released in theaters on December 25th, and the impending public debut of OpenAI could make the film's messages about Altman that much more relevant.

What sets Fielder's You Can See Everything apart from any of these recent tech films is how direct a view it gives to its subject's real life. Production on the documentary began after Holmes had already been sentenced to more than 11 years in prison, and Fielder used his access to question him about why he doesn't believe he defrauded Theranos investors. Invited to live with Holmes and his partner William Evans in a rented house during the month before his sentence begins, Fielder allows himself to become a character who can't quite tell whether his hosts' supposed desire for radical transparency is real.

This central tension makes You Can See Everything a wonderfully surprising watch that challenges you to consider who is really in control of the documentary. Throughout the film, Fielder repeatedly wonders if Holmes is using him as part of his recent PR campaign, and he leaves the audience to draw their own conclusions.

It often feels like Fielder is asking viewers to really listen to how Holmes is on camera and then reconcile that persona with what you might have read about Holmes in the news or seen on Hulu's The Dropout. Whether or not Holmes is really just a dedicated performer willing to pull all the punches in public, you get to see it all feel like an in-depth and honest examination of one of Silicon Valley's most infamous figures — someone who's already in the public eye.

Although some of these films have failed at the box office, their existence is indicative of a larger cultural shift in how people think about modern technology and the powers behind it. Hollywood has spent years mocking and mythologizing the founders, and parts of the industry are finally starting to look more critically. As we continue to grapple with implications like Elon Musk's tenure at DOGE and OpenAI's quest to build productive artificial intelligence into every aspect of our lives, audiences' appetite for films like this could only grow. And with all these founders competing to monopolize the next technological frontier, the entertainment industry will likely have plenty of resources to mine.

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