Pick up your Prada from the cleaners, slip on your flip flops and get wired in — because a Social Network sequel is reportedly on its way.
Deadline reported on Wednesday, June 25, that after years of searching for an angle to expand his 2010 film, Aaron Sorkin will write and direct The Social Network II for Sony Pictures. According to the outlet, the film will not be a straight sequel but a follow up to the original story that detailed Mark Zuckerberg’s rise as the creator of Facebook.
Sorkin, who wrote the original screenplay, will reportedly take inspiration from The Facebook Files for the sequel, a series of articles leaked in October 2021 and published by the Wall Street Journal that detailed the inner workings and potential harms of the social media platform.
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Per Deadline, no production date is set. It is unknown if Jesse Eisenberg, who portrayed Zuckerberg in the fist film, will reprise his role. Todd Black, Peter Rice, Stuart Besser and Sorkin are reportedly producers on the project.
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Us Weekly has reached out to Sony for comment.
Directed by David Fincher, The Social Network hit theaters in 2010 and followed Zuckerberg at Harvard as he created the now-famous social networking site. Justin Timberlake, Rooney Mara and Andrew Garfield — who portrayed Zuckerberg’s cofounder Eduardo Saverin — also starred.
The biographical drama won Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score and Best Film Editing at the 2011 Academy Awards. The film’s eight Oscar nominations included Best Picture and Best Actor for Eisenberg. It also took home the 2011 Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture — Drama, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Original Score.
Sorkin has previously spoken about his desire to write a sequel over the years, and been open about his criticisms of the platform.
“There’s supposed to be a constant tension at Facebook between growth and integrity. There isn’t. There’s just growth,” the West Wing creator said during a 2024 episode of “The Town” podcast. “If Mark Zuckerberg woke up tomorrow morning and realized there is nothing you can buy for $120 billion that you can’t buy for $119 billion, ‘So how about if I make a little bit less money? I will tune up integrity and tune down growth.’ Yes, you can do that by switching a one to a zero.”
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As for Zuckerberg, the tech giant has called the original movie “hurtful,” claiming that various aspects of the story were “made up” for entertainment purposes.
“I think the reality is that writing code and building a product and then building a company actually is not a glamorous enough thing to make a movie about,” the billionaire claimed in a 2014 Facebook Q&A Live. “So you can imagine that a lot of the stuff they probably had to embellish and make up. If they were really making a movie, it would have been of me, sitting at a computer coding for two hours straight, which probably would have just not been that good of a movie and these guys, I think, want to win awards and sell tickets.”
He continued,”They went out of their way in the movie to try to get some interesting details correct, like the design of the office, but on the overarching plot, in terms of why we’re building Facebook to help connect the world, or how we did it, they just kind of made up a bunch of stuff that I found kind of hurtful. I take our mission really seriously, and we’re here not primarily to just build a company, but to help connect the world… The thing that I found the most interesting about the movie, was that they kind of made up this whole plot line about how I somehow decided to create Facebook to, I think, attract girls.”
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Zuckerberg also has yet to come face to face with Sorkin, but did cross paths with Eisenberg back in 2011.
“To this day I haven’t met the writer or a lot of the folks who made the movie,” Zuckerberg confessed at the time. “I met the guy who played me in the movie one time when I was on Saturday Night Live. I think he was a little afraid to meet me after his portrayal, but I tried to be nice… I think the real story is just a lot of hard work.”
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