Skip ‘The Social Reckoning,’ Because ‘The Social Network’ Already Said It All

Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison star in Aaron Sorkin's Facebook follow-up, which lands where the 2010 original already did.

Skip “The Social Reckoning.” Aaron Sorkin's second Facebook movie, which Sony releases Thursday, spends 1 hour and 52 minutes on a point his first one made better: Mark Zuckerberg got rich by stepping on people, and the money didn't warm him up.

I'd say that even if the reviews were kind, and the movie's biggest fan helps make the case. Deadline's review sums up the Zuckerberg of “The Social Network” as a kid who backstabbed his way to billions. The new one, played by Jeremy Strong, is humorless and cold, the same man 15 years on, now rehearsing for Congress on a bulletproof couch.

The sequel label is the sales pitch. Deadline's review says it took the sequel hook to get Sony to bite, then admits the finished film “doesn't feel like a sequel at all.” It plays as a newsroom thriller in the “All the President's Men” mold. Jeremy Allen White is Jeff Horwitz, the Wall Street Journal's new tech reporter, and Mikey Madison is Frances Haugen, the Facebook insider who brings him the company's internal files.

Several of the people who made the first one great didn't come back. David Fincher didn't direct, since he was busy with Netflix's “Cliff Booth” movie, SlashFilm noted, so Sorkin directed his own script. Jesse Eisenberg turned down Sorkin's offer to play Zuckerberg again, Deadline says. The Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score is gone too, replaced by an orchestral one from Alexandre Desplat. Variety put it right in its headline: the follow-up is “missing more than just David Fincher.”

A stack of Wednesday's reviews says there isn't much left. TheWrap says it “isn't worth sharing.” IndieWire went after the performances. SlashFilm calls Madison miscast, finds no chemistry between her and White, and says the film runs technically shorter than the original “but somehow feels twice as long.”

The bigger problem is that this story has already been told, and well, by the people who lived it. Horwitz's reporting became 17 stories in the Journal, Haugen testified before Congress, and Facebook renamed itself Meta weeks after the findings went public, according to Deadline. Both of them wrote books, and those books are what got Sorkin interested.

So the movie retells a finished story and hopes it plays as a crusade. SlashFilm makes the sharpest point about that: Sorkin wants a triumph for truth, but in the end Zuckerberg stayed rich and powerful and Facebook is still running. A crusade movie needs the dragon to lose.

Yes, Deadline found it stirring and The Hollywood Reporter found it sharp. Deadline also credits Madison, in her first lead role since her Oscar for “Anora,” with impressive range. But all that praise goes to the newsroom thriller, which only makes the case that this movie never needed the old title on the poster.

Deadline's own critic finishes the argument for me. He writes that Luca Guadagnino's “Artificial,” the OpenAI origin story with Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman that premiered Monday at the New York Film Festival, feels more like a natural sequel to “The Social Network” than this one does. When the friendliest review in the pile says the real sequel is somebody else's movie, take the hint.

Source: Deadline, retrieved October 7, 2026. Other sources: slashfilm.com.