Aaron Sorkin is going back to Facebook, but this time the story starts long after the college-dorm days.
The Social Reckoning opens in theaters October 9 with Sorkin writing and directing. The movie is being described as a companion piece to The Social Network rather than a traditional sequel, and the difference is pretty clear. Facebook is already enormous by the time this story begins.
At the center of it is Frances Haugen, played by Mikey Madison. Haugen worked inside Facebook before becoming a whistleblower and providing internal documents that helped fuel The Wall Street Journal’s reporting known as The Facebook Files.
In the movie, she turns to reporter Jeff Horwitz, played by Jeremy Allen White. Together, they find themselves taking on a company with far more money and influence than either of them could possibly match.
Aaron Sorkin returns to a very different Facebook
Aaron Sorkin returns to familiar territory here, although The Social Reckoning comes at Facebook from a very different direction.
He wrote The Social Network, the 2010 film directed by David Fincher that looked at Facebook’s early years and the people fighting over its creation. Sorkin won an Academy Award for the screenplay, so his decision to revisit Facebook more than 15 years later immediately gives the new movie an interesting connection to what came before.
This time, though, Sorkin comes back to a company that is no longer trying to prove it can become something huge. It already has. The question now is what happens when somebody on the inside decides the public should know more about what the company knows and how it operates.
That puts Haugen in a difficult position. She has information most people don’t have, but deciding what to do with it carries its own risks. Horwitz then has to determine what can be verified, what can be published and just how big the story really is.
The studio calls it a David and Goliath story, which seems pretty fitting.
Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White lead the story
Madison arrives after winning an Oscar for Anora, while White has spent the past several years earning praise for The Bear. Then there is Jeremy Strong, who plays Mark Zuckerberg, and that casting alone should get some attention.
Jesse Eisenberg made Zuckerberg one of the most memorable parts of The Social Network, so Strong is stepping into a role audiences already associate with somebody else. After Succession, though, seeing him at the center of another story involving money, power and a massive corporation doesn’t exactly feel out of place. The cast also includes Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, Billy Magnussen and Bill Burr.
The Social Reckoning has a new story to tell
A lot has changed since The Social Network arrived more than 15 years ago.
Back then, much of the fascination was about how Facebook started and how quickly it grew. The conversation today includes privacy, safety, misinformation and the influence social media has on everyday life.
That’s what gives Aaron Sorkin a reason to return.
He isn’t going back to retell the beginning. The Social Reckoning is looking at what happened after Facebook became something much bigger.
Watch the new trailer for The Social Reckoning below.
The Social Reckoning opens exclusively in theaters October 9.
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