Sorkin Goes Back to Facebook

Sixteen years after The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning opens today, following the whistleblower who exposed what Facebook knew about its own harms.

Today, The Social Reckoning opens in theaters nationwide, 16 years and eight days after The Social Network arrived on October 1, 2010. Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, the film is billed by Sony as a "companion piece" to the original rather than a direct sequel, moving the story forward to the moment the world began asking harder questions about the platform that began in a Harvard dorm room.

From Origin Story to Accountability

Where The Social Network followed Facebook's founding in 2004, The Social Reckoning draws on The Facebook Files, the 2021 Wall Street Journal series by reporter Jeff Horwitz that revealed internal research on the platform's effects. Mikey Madison, an Oscar winner for Anora, plays Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who became the whistleblower behind those revelations and later testified before Congress. Jeremy Allen White plays Horwitz, and Jeremy Strong takes over the role of Mark Zuckerberg from Jesse Eisenberg, with Bill Burr, Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, and Billy Magnussen rounding out the cast. Rated R and running one hour and 52 minutes, the film is in theaters only, with no streaming date announced.

The movie arrives without David Fincher, the director whose style helped make the original a landmark, and early critical reaction is a reminder that follow-ups rarely have an easy road. A.V. Club critic Monica Castillo, for one, found that Strong's Zuckerberg gets lost in his own story and that Fincher's craft is sorely missed, calling the film a Sorkin-saturated take on the journalistic story. Other reviews are still coming in, and audiences will decide for themselves this weekend.

A darkened movie theater with an audience watching a glowing screen reflected in smartphone-lit faces

The Social Reckoning opens in theaters nationwide today.

There is something fitting about the pairing. The Social Network captured a moment when social media still felt like a clever new idea, and its closing note was one of ambivalence about the man who built it. Sixteen years later, the story has shifted from how the platform was made to what it has done, and from the founder to the people who tried to hold it to account. Whether Sorkin's version of that story succeeds is a question for this weekend's box office and the critics, but the subject is one the culture is clearly still working through.