Big tech goes to Hollywood: is Silicon Valley ready for a silver-screen reckoning?
Its moguls are ripe subjects for drama, and there is huge anticipation for forthcoming features The Social Reckoning and Artificial. But other projects have failed as the film industry is increasingly colonised by IT empires
Tom Cruise, Oli6
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‘I know there are easier enemies to make,” tech reporter Jeremy Allen White tells his colleague in a recent trailer for The Social Reckoning. “The mafia would be an easier enemy to make,” comes the reply. They’re talking about Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, but they might as well be discussing big tech as a whole. As The Social Reckoning promises to underline, it’s become clear that these people are not on our side – “us” being the whole of humanity except billionaire tech overlords and their mates. But for an industry that loves a clear-cut baddie, Hollywood has barely landed a blow on the tech industry. Now it finds itself in mortal danger of being absorbed by it. Is it too late to fight back?
The Social Reckoning’s predecessor, The Social Network, showed how this kind of thing is done. It was pacy, buzzy and full of weirder-than-life characters – not least the young Zuckerberg, portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg as an obnoxiously smart mogul-in-the-making, whose mission to connect the world stood in stark contrast to his own social deficiencies. Directed by David Fincher and co-written by Aaron Sorkin, it was also a commercial and critical hit, winning three Oscars. But a big part of what made The Social Network work, and makes its sequel such a threat, is that it was about the actual, real-world Silicon Valley, which is where a lot of recent entertainment has gone wrong.
In the years since, we’ve had a lot of underwhelming satire featuring fictionalised tech moguls. Jesse Armstrong’s Mountainhead, for example, with its quartet of broligarchs carving up the world from on high. Or the various bonkers tech titans in Don’t Look Up (Mark Rylance), Knives Out: Glass Onion (Ed Norton), Alien: Earth (Samuel Blenkin) or The Circle (Tom Hanks). These films obliquely caricatured real-life figures such as Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, but why go for veiled satire when the real Silicon Valley is so full of drama, incident and deeply weird, often terrible, now globally notorious personalities?
The Social Reckoning certainly has a lot to work with: in the 16 years since the original, all manner of social, emotional and political harm has been laid at the doors of Meta/Facebook, while Zuckerberg himself has only become more weird/terrible/notorious – and therefore ripe for impersonation. Jeremy Strong, replacing Eisenberg, must fancy his awards chances. Written and directed by Sorkin, the sequel focuses on whistleblower Frances Haugen (Anora’s Mikey Madison), who leaked details of the company’s machinations to the press. Courtroom drama, verbal sparring, a bit of social justice grandstanding – it looks very much in Sorkin’s wheelhouse.
Another ripped-from-the-headlines drama holds similar promise, but also highlights the real-world perils of tackling big tech head-on. Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial dramatises the real-life saga of OpenAI, and again, it’s a juicier story than any fiction, focusing on shifty CEO Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield) and the many enemies he created along the way, including Musk (Ike Barinholtz – perfect casting) and the OpenAI board (Monica Barbaro, Cooper Hoffman and Yura Borisov, among others), whose efforts to oust Altman famously backfired. The script was described as “the Social Network on steroids”.
But life didn’t like being imitated by art. In June this year Artificial’s producers, Amazon MGM Studios, suddenly dropped the completed movie, saying they felt it would be “better served if it were released by a different studio”. A few months earlier, Amazon and OpenAI had entered into a $50bn “strategic partnership” to “develop customised models available to power Amazon’s customer-facing applications” – which sounds like the world’s least exciting movie, but also points to inevitable synergies between tech and entertainment. Indie distributor Neon eventually stepped in, and is now releasing Artificial in early 2027.
It’s too late to talk of a takeover – most Hollywood studios are wholly or partly tech companies already: Amazon, Apple, Sony, Netflix. But big tech is coming for the rest, and its pockets are very deep. On the macro scale, there is the fraught $110bn takeover of Warner Bros by Paramount, which is currently being held up in US courts. A large chunk of the money is coming via Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, whose personal wealth peaked at over $400bn, but has plummeted since. Disney made a $1bn investment and entered into a licensing agreement with OpenAI last year, and even hot indie label A24 has entered into a $75m “research partnership” with Google’s AI division DeepMind. If you’re looking for a real portent of change, news leaked last week that Gwyneth Paltrow is allegedly to host a private, “off the record” dinner at her Hamptons home in honour of Altman.
If this were a simple matter of Hollywood coming under new management, that would be showbusiness as usual, but the tech takeover could be having a chilling effect on what does and doesn’t get made. Many of Hollywood’s tech moguls – Ellison, Altman, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos – are cosy with the Trump administration, which has not flinched from exerting its influence over media and entertainment. That could explain why not only did we nearly not get to see Artificial, we also did get to see Melania, the brazen puff-piece documentary on the first lady, for which Amazon shelled out $40m. How many other tech stories are no longer being greenlit in this new climate? In 2024, for example, Netflix announced Thumblite, a new show led by Rosamund Pike billed as a “Silicon Valley House of Cards” – but it somehow never got off the ground.
But not even big tech calls all the shots. Elon Musk used his X pulpit to rant against Christopher Nolan’s “woke” Odyssey, for example, but everyone ignored him and went to see it anyway. Now Musk could be getting a taste of his own medicine: pugnacious film-maker Alex Gibney has a four-hour documentary on him premiering at the Venice film festival, which promises to “reframe the story of the tech titan as the 21st-century reincarnation of the confidence man”.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg’s Meta has just resolved anotherlandmark case in the US over its allegedly harmful products, agreeing to a $17bn settlement – so you could say they’re already laying the groundwork for part three to the Social Network/Reckoning franchise.
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