Nobody jumped when writer-director Aaron Sorkin announced his intentions to actually make a sequel to The Social Network. The 2010 film, penned by Sorkin and directed with icy skill by David Fincher, would have been equally unnecessary in anyone else’s hands. That it premiered in the year it did — timely enough to sum up the past 10 years of the social media boom, and prescient enough to forecast Zuckerberg’s fall from grace — was something of a miracle. But a sequel has always felt gratuitous because... well, aren’t we already living in it?
We’ve had a front-row seat to the inflation of Zuckerberg’s ego; many of us read the exposé, published by the Wall Street Journal, that confirmed the worst about his empire. The rest of us experienced the mind-numbing toxicity and misinformation running rampant on Facebook firsthand. Journalist Jeff Horwitz was one of the first to wrangle that fuzzy data into allegations that could be quantified, and later used to indict Zuckerberg for a kind of social media malpractice. In a just world (read: a world not implicitly obsessed with IP), the “Facebook Files” would be the final word on the platform for at least a few decades. But Sorkin genuinely believes that “it’s time to say more” — fortunately, he’s tapped Succession’s Jeremy Strong as his new spokesman.
