The tech backlash is now in theaters
The Verge · LC · trust 51/100
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Between The Social Reckoning , You Can See Everything , Musk , and Artificial , filmmakers are taking Big Tech to task.
Charles Pulliam-Moore Close Charles Pulliam-Moore Film & TV Reporter Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
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Between The Social Reckoning , You Can See Everything , Musk , and Artificial , filmmakers are taking Big Tech to task.
Charles Pulliam-Moore Close Charles Pulliam-Moore Film & TV Reporter Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
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Though movies about disruptive tech founders are nothing new, 2026 has been unusually stacked with features that take a much more critical look at how Silicon Valley is reshaping our reality. Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning frames Mark Zuckerberg as a robotic villain whose ambitions are destabilizing society . Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything paints a damning picture of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes as she prepares for her ongoing stint in prison . After years of being widely celebrated as a visionary, you can see how the larger narrative around Elon Musk has shifted in projects like Alex Gibney’s Musk documentary . And while Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial is a dark comedy, it is also a character study that makes Sam Altman look like a manipulative sociopath .
Even though some of these movies are fictionalized dramas, each of them draws from the wealth of critical reporting that has revealed their subjects to be less-than-savory characters. You get the sense that these filmmakers are trying to tell stories that are meant to resonate with audiences whose views of Big Tech have long since begun to dim. But it also feels like some of Hollywood’s biggest studios are finally embracing the idea that the tech backlash isn’t letting up anytime soon.
Especially when you compare them to classics like The Social Network , the latest wave of cinematic dramas based on Silicon Valley power struggles has been far less sympathetic to their central figures. David Fincher’s 2010 film starring Jesse Eisenberg presented Zuckerberg as a complicated and misunderstood savant, but The Social Reckoning builds its story around the idea that the Facebook / Meta head is a man whose obsession with growth poses an existential threat to democracy. By focusing on the allegations leveled by whistleblower Frances Haugen , the movie is able to highlight Zuckerberg’s public transformation into a powerful executive who wields autocratic control over a multibillion-dollar social media empire.
What The Social Reckoning lacks in timeliness ( The Wall Street Journal began reporting Haugen’s warnings in 2021) and stylistic flair, it makes up for in the way it connects Facebook / Meta’s past internal decisions to events that are still playing out in real time. The movie’s scenes that dig into Instagram’s negative impacts on teens’ mental health and the relationship between Facebook’s algorithm and the spread of misinformation feel as if they’re speaking directly to present-day concerns about how much influence Meta has over people’s lives. Similarly, Gibney’s Musk documentary acts as both a chronicle of the xAI / SpaceX head’s past and an inquiry into why the public was ever willing to let Musk accrue so much power within governments across the world.
Musk’s response to Gibney’s film has been telling. X has blocked the feature from being advertised on the platform, and Musk — a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” — has threatened to take legal action against Gibney for producing a “hit piece.” It wasn’t entirely surprising to see Musk personally badmouthing a project that casts him in a negative light, but it was curious to see the Musk ads initially missing from other social media platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok .
Though the Meta subsidiaries and YouTube ultimately reversed their decisions, TikTok has stuck to its guns — which feels notable given the company’s indirect connections to the Trump administration by way of Skydance Corporation CEO David Ellison. David’s father — Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison — is a longtime Donald Trump supporter and one of the American billionaires who led the consortium of investors that purchased TikTok’s US business late last year . Ellison has reportedly promised Gibney that Musk will air on HBO (now a part of Skydance) sometime next January. The film is currently screening in select theaters, but it is hard to argue that it hasn’t had to deal with an unusual amount of outside interference in the weeks leading up to its release.
Guadagnino’s Artificial — which was originally going to be released by Amazon — also faced unexpected marketing challenges this year. The streaming giant backed out of its deal to distribute the film this past June , just months after announcing that it was investing $50 billion in OpenAI. All of that made it seem very much like Amazon and other studios financially involved with AI companies might be cooling on the idea of releasing projects critical of the technology’s creators. Now that Artificial has begun screening and people…
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