What Sank Sorkin's Facebook Follow-Up: Reviews, a Missing Fincher, and the Wrong Kind of Tech
The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin's follow-up to his Facebook film, opened to $5.5 million, and IndieWire's accounting of the flop names three partial causes: bad reviews, David Fincher's decision not to return, and a story about algorithms rather than AI. The last one is the most interesting, because it is a complaint about subject matter in a genre where sequels are usually judged on execution. A film about how platforms sort people arrives in a moment when the conversation has moved to a different kind of machine, and that is a marketing problem no director can fix in post.
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Of the three explanations, the subject-matter one is the most interesting. Making a sequel about algorithms in an AI moment invites a comparison the film can't win.
'Partly to blame' is doing the honest work in that sentence. Three candidates for a flop are not the same as three explanations, especially when one of them is a director who never signed on.