Why 'Social Network' Was Shelved While Technical Films Still Face Box Office Tests

One analyst tells The Hollywood Reporter about the Facebook-focused feature: "The story has lost its edge, at a time when a wave of tech-driven titles is hitting screens this year.

The Social Reckoning had a rough opening weekend at the box office, sparking debate about the prospects for a 2026 collection of titles exploring the realm of technology.

Aaron Sorkin's 2010 sequel to David Fincher's acclaimed The Social Network , for which Sorkin won an Oscar for Adapted Screenplay, grossed a disappointing $5.5 million domestically, even less than Sony Pictures' soft initial projections for the film's $30 million wide release. While the 2010 film starred Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in the story of the platform's early days, The Social Reckoning replaces Eisenberg with Jeremy Strong as the company's CEO. Mikey Madison as a Facebook employee who teams up with a journalist (Jeremy Allen White) to uncover dark truths.

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After a great box office debut with $224 million worldwide, The Social Network continues to be hailed as a masterpiece of its era. But clearly, a lot has changed about the world since then. While the influence of technology — and the billionaires who run such companies — on American life has never been more apparent, it remains to be seen whether today's Hollywood look can successfully capture what makes the field such fodder for conversation.

Rentrak's Paul Dergarabedian tells The Hollywood Reporter that the social network entered the Facebook world "at a time when people had a more emotional connection to the platform." Frankly, Facebook was a much more interesting subject in 2010. Today, it has become more of a functional tool, and the story told in The Social Reckoning is very different and arguably more challenging from a business perspective.

It's clear that the faces of technology play a big role in everyday life, as the often polarizing personalities cause outrage and controversy. But some recent social media posts surrounding the release of The Social Reckoning, which has about 55 percent of Rotten Tomatoes critics, suggest that self-absorbed billionaires dealing in the public's fear of artificial intelligence and the political influence of tech figures aren't stories audiences might want to see in this challenging cultural moment.

Also in theaters over the weekend was Alex Gibney's Elon Musk-centric documentary Musk , with the nearly four-hour film taking in $69,321 from four screenings for the second-best frame-per-screen average. Next weekend sees the arrival of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's buzzed-about three-hour documentary You Can See Everything from Elizabeth Holmes. Meanwhile, Neon set Luca Guadagnino's AI for a December run after the film, starring Andrew Garfield as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, was shelved by Amazon earlier this year.

In contrast to The Social Reckoning, reviews for Artificial, You Can See Everything and Musk have been overwhelming. While their collective impact at the box office remains uncertain, their fortunes will likely fare better if they continue to generate awards buzz, something that might elude Sorkin's film at this point.

"The rich and the rich have always been irresistible in media, so it seems pretty clear why we're seeing so many movies about tech billionaires right now: They're our new masters," quips Alison DeFran, an Occidental College media arts and culture professor and Science Fiction Research Award winner. Although neither Musk nor Zuckerberg are known to me as particularly charismatic, what is fascinating is their extraordinary and often invisible influence on our daily lives.

Hollywood and Silicon Valley continue to share a complicated relationship, with Amazon's decision to drop Artificial coming months after the tech giant announced a major partnership with OpenAI, the subject of the film Blister. A recent example of this continued entanglement came last week with the news that tech entrepreneur and philanthropist Lauren Powell Jobs — once Disney's largest shareholder after the death of her husband Steve Jobs — joined the board of the newly formed Skydance, a company founded by David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison.

"The worlds of Hollywood and big tech have become increasingly intertwined and synonymous, with the flows of funding, ownership and influence that come with greater convergence," says Andrew Utterson, professor of screen studies at Ithaca College. "The hope is that filmmakers will continue to tell technology-focused stories that matter, without undue influence from powerful people and corporate entities."

Indeed, The Social Reckoning's bland presence may be more representative of its particular focus than whether tech stories can captivate the big screen.

"It's kind of like yesterday's news to worry about misinformation," says Gabriel Rossman, a professor of economic sociology at UCLA. But it's clear that people are very interested in AI, and from different perspectives. "So the turning point of these films [as a potential failure] is [artificial, given that] Altman is arguably one of the most important people alive right now."

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