It will clip up well … Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning. Photograph: Leah Gallo View image in fullscreen It will clip up well … Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning. Photograph: Leah Gallo Film Will the Zuckerberg, Musk and Altman movies make a dent on tech giant evangelism? Rory Doherty The triple release of The Social Reckoning, Musk and Artificial is less a clear political stance, more like movie studio opportunism
H ollywood is sending a clear message: it’s a friend of tech. Netflix is no longer a lone disruptor: historic studio MGM is now the property of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos; David Ellison’s takeover of Paramount and subsequent Warner Bros merger was supported by his tech giant father; and Apple TV has acted as a patron for multiple film-maker passion projects. Everyone, including trendy auteur-factory A24, is tying themselves financially to AI.
The enormous pull of the tech industry – including its many trillions of dollars, oversized influence on politics and heavily pushed algorithms and AI products – means Hollywood is not alone in courting its wealth, but it has intensified the historic tension between art and commerce in the entertainment business. Technology that augments the human experience may be a compelling narrative subject, but this year brings a trio of films about the gurus responsible for the industry’s false promises.
Starring Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, The Social Reckoning is Aaron Sorkin’s pseudo-sequel to The Social Network, about Facebook employee Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) blowing the whistle on her employer for building an algorithm that radicalised the “alt-right” and damaged teen mental health. This week, two further films receive their UK premiere at the BFI London film festival – Musk is a four-hour study of the SpaceX CEO from Alex Gibney, the documentarian who previously tackled the Enron bankruptcy scandal and Theranos founder and fraudster Elizabeth Holmes. Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial stars Andrew Garfield (whose breakout role was as Zuckerberg’s ex-bestie in The Social Network) as OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, who was fired and rehired by his own board a year after the release of ChatGPT.
View image in fullscreen Outsized influence on politics … Elon Musk in a still from Alex Gibney’s Musk. Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP All three projects come with a degree of buzz that goes beyond their directors’ credentials. We are long overdue a meaningful, mainstream critical rebuke of the volatile and egocentric “great men” rewarded by our tech-obsessed culture. Zuckerberg, Musk and Altman are among the biggest names in tech, and all three recently aligned with President Trump to protect their companies’ interests. Seeing major if unrelated film projects taking them to task gives the impression of a united front of tech scepticism. But how strongly can a major motion picture attack big tech? In the case of Artificial, there may be a cost to biting the hand that feeds you, as Amazon decided to not distribute the film, after announcing a $50bn (£38bn) “strategic partnership” with OpenAI.
Certain contextual details lend the films an edge of legitimacy and danger: a distributor suddenly unloading a hot-button project; Sony hiring an outside law firm to vet every fact in The Social Reckoning ; or TikTok and X blocking trailer advertisements for Musk. These anecdotes are cleanly rolled into the films’ marketing, fanning the audience’s desire to see something…