Aaron Sorkin explains why The Social Reckoning isn’t really a sequel to The Social Network

More than 15 years after he scripted one of the most defining films of the 21st century in The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin has returned to the subject of Mark Zuckerberg with new drama The Social Reckoning.

The new movie dramatises the investigation that led to the 2021 Wall Street Journal exposé titled The Facebook Files, with Sorkin this time serving as both writer and director, and Jeremy Strong taking over from Jesse Eisenberg in the role of Zuckerberg.

But although The Social Reckoning has naturally been described as a sequel to the earlier movie, Sorkin himself doesn't necessarily see it that way – as he explained to Radio Times at the film's world premiere in London.

"It's not how I approached writing it," he said during an exclusive interview. "It's not a traditional sequel."

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He added: "Think of it this way: it’s movie about Facebook by the same writer who wrote The Social Network, and one of the characters in The Social Network is in this. It's as if Henry Hill from Goodfellas showed up as a character in Casino!"

He also pointed out that, unlike in The Social Network, Zuckerberg was not the main character this time around.

"It's a whistleblower, newspaper story in which Facebook is what they're investigating," he said. "And so obviously Mark Zuckerberg is a character. But the central characters are [whistleblower] Francis Haugen (Mikey Madison) and [reporter] Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White)."

Although he had done a great deal of research into Facebook and the world of social media more generally while working on The Social Network, Sorkin conceded that he would never have anticipated things developing in the way they did – something which he calls "a failure of imagination" on his part.

"What I didn't foresee was something that happened a few years after The Social Network came out," he continued. "Which is that Facebook went from being kind of a cool thing where you keep track of your friends from school, or you can in a non-creepy way approach a woman.

"They added the newsfeed, and that changed everything. Suddenly. Because you're getting bespoke news, right? Your algorithm is showing you the news it thinks you're going to be interested in, and so we're all living in different realities."

But he added that although he found that his trademark sense of optimism was "harder to come by" these days, he nonetheless felt a sense of hope about the events depicted in the film.

"It's more needed than ever, optimism," he said. "I hope the audience feels at the end of the movie that David picked up a rock and threw it at Goliath."

The Social Reckoning will be released in UK cinemas on Friday 9 October.

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Authors

Patrick Cremona is the Senior Film Writer at Radio Times, and looks after all the latest film releases both in cinemas and on streaming. He has been with the website since October 2019, and in that time has interviewed a host of big name stars and reviewed a diverse range of movies.