Aaron Sorkin accepted the Maverick Director Award at the Newport Beach Film Festival this week, which is a lovely honor and also roughly the same weekend 1,987 theaters decided they'd rather show literally anything else.
The movie is "The Social Reckoning," Sorkin's sequel to "The Social Network." He wrote it. He directed it. It stars Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, Mikey Madison as a Facebook whistleblower, and Jeremy Allen White as the reporter who listens to her. It is a two-hour warning that the internet is bad for you, and America responded by staying home on the internet.
Here's the scoreboard, and it's brutal. The film opened Oct. 9 at No. 5 with about $5 million. The second weekend fell 72%. By the third weekend, Box Office Mojo shows it went from 2,606 theaters to 619. That's not a slow fade. That's the cinema equivalent of getting voted off the island while still giving your speech about the island.
The Hollywood Reporter puts the budget at $40 million and the worldwide gross at about $15 million. The Rotten Tomatoes score is 54%, which in reality-TV terms is the contestant the producers keep around because the fight scenes are good, not because anyone likes them.
And Sorkin, to his credit, was honest at the festival. "I was my second choice to direct it," he said, explaining he'd rather David Fincher had done it, but Fincher has an exclusive deal with Netflix and the movie belonged to Sony. So the man was handed an award for being a maverick director while openly saying he wished another director had done the job. That's not a maverick. That's a bachelor accepting the final rose and asking if the runner-up is still in the parking lot.
He also told The Hollywood Reporter he worries the parts of directing he's not good at are the parts you can't teach. Hollywood had a whole weekend to argue with him, and 1,987 theaters chose not to.
There's something perfect about it. The original "Social Network" earned about $224 million and three Oscars by making Zuckerberg look like a guy you'd never want to be. Sixteen years later, the sequel asks the audience to feel guilty about the app in their hands, and the audience feels guilty for about four seconds before checking it to see what's playing instead. The answer, at 1,987 locations, was "Clayface," a stop-motion fantasy and a rom-com called "Wicker."
This is the Hollywood business model now. Make a lecture, call it prestige, release it in October so it can be an "awards contender," then hand each other awards in Orange County while the ticket counter looks like a DMV on a holiday.
Picture the poor projectionist at theater number 1,988, the one that kept it. He's got three people in a 200-seat room, one of them asleep, one of them scrolling Facebook through the whistleblower's big speech.
Sorkin will be fine. He'll write the next one, and someone else will direct it, ideally somebody he'd pick first.
This article is satire. The Demorat is a parody news site; real facts are drawn from the linked sources, and jokes, invented scenes, and fictional characters are not real.
The real story that inspired this
