Sixteen years after The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin has finally returned to Facebook with an official sequel, The Social Reckoning. You would think the conversation this week would revolve around whether his actual sequel lives up to one of the best movies of the 2010s. Instead, another tech drama has wandered into the room and started eating its lunch.
Reviews for The Social Reckoning have landed ahead of its Oct. 9 release, and the response is decidedly mixed (though several CinemaBlend staff members saw it and like it.). Meanwhile, Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial also premiered at the New York Film Festival and immediately started getting called the real spiritual successor to David Fincher’s The Social Network.
Andrew Garfield being at the center of both movies only makes the whole thing weirder.
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The Social Reckoning Responses Are Pretty Split
Sorkin’s follow-up has plenty that critics like. Mikey Madison leads a stacked cast as Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, while Jeremy Allen White stars as Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, and Jeremy Strong takes over Mark Zuckerberg, as Jesse Eisenberg decided not to return. Early reactions have praised Madison and White’s chemistry, Strong’s deeply weird Zuckerberg and Sorkin’s dialogue. CinemaBlend’s own Jessica Rawden was on the positive side of the divide, and told me she enjoyed how funny the script was.
Other critics have called it a solid investigative journalism drama that works best when it stops trying to live up to Fincher’s original, with Matt Neglia explaining the mixed reviews:
THE SOCIAL RECKONING is an old-fashioned investigative journalism drama from Aaron Sorkin examining the dangers and manipulations of Facebook, as they prioritize profits over people at an alarming rate of growth. As usual with Sorkin, it moves at a good pace, plowing through facts and figures at a mile a minute while delivering colorful dialogue that occasionally makes you laugh, though mostly because you know there’s no world in which actual human beings, either online or in real life, would ever talk like this.
But this post isn’t where the conversation ends; some say it’s “mid,” while others are downright trashing it. Here are some of the standout reactions.
- @ludgatefilm: “caught an early screening of the social reckoning tn and… let’s hope this is true bc reckoning was not great 😭”
- @mattrorabeck: “THE SOCIAL RECKONING is a heavy-handed disaster desperately grasping at the legacy of the original. Playing out like a cheap Spirit Halloween cosplay, it’s laughably bad at best and painfully dull at worst. One of the worst movies of the year.”
- @culkinco: “streets saying the social reckoning is mid and jeremy strong is the weakest link”
Variety’s write-up goes even harder, describing the movie as a downgrade and arguing that its Facebook revelations already feel strangely historical compared with where tech has moved since 2021. Which brings us to the movie critics cannot seem to stop comparing it with.
Simultaneously, users like @stonelovebot have highlighted the rumblings they’ve been hearing about Artificial, writing on X:
People calling artificial the true social network sequel… okay now you got me interested.
Sorkin wrote The Social Network, but David Fincher directed it. This time Sorkin is doing both jobs, and several reviews argue the sequel lacks the visual bite and tension Fincher brought to people sitting in rooms arguing about websites.
Is ‘Artificial’ The Real Sequel?
Artificial is about OpenAI, with Garfield playing Sam Altman and Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever. It dramatizes Altman’s infamous 2023 firing and return while digging into the people who helped unleash generative AI on the world.
Variety’s review straight-up calls Guadagnino’s movie the “real sequel” to The Social Network. Critics coming out of NYFF have been making similar comparisons, and the movie is currently earning far stronger early notices than Sorkin’s official follow-up.
Film critic Joshua Rothkopf put it particularly bluntly in a reaction shared on X. He writes:
Luca Guadagnino just ate Sorkin’s lunch. In every way, ARTIFICIAL is the spiritual sequel to THE SOCIAL NETWORK, threading together betrayal, broken ethics and humor — and arriving at a vision as scary as COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT. Damon Albarn’s Bowie-esque score ftw. #NYFF
For this particular critic, the mix of betrayal, broken ethics and humor brought Artificial closer to Network than Reckoning could. What’s even stranger about the comparisons between these two tech flicks is the Andrew Garfield connection.
There’s The Andrew Garfield Of It All
There is something almost too perfect about Garfield being part of this conversation. He played Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network, delivering arguably the movie’s most famous confrontation when Eduardo finally realizes Zuckerberg has diluted his Facebook shares. Now he is playing another major tech figure in a film critics are comparing more favorably to The Social Network than the actual sequel.
One early reaction even claims Artificial has its own laptop-smashing moment that tops Eduardo’s famous scene. I’m not sure I am emotionally prepared to accept that until I see it myself.
Garfield isn’t where the connections end, as there seems to be an unofficial box-office competition taking place. As @horsejeans points out on X:
I love how between Social Reckoning, Artificial, Cliff Booth, and the Debut we’re basically doing a science experiment called “who should get the most credit for the Social Network being great”
That’s right: David Fincher is directing The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, Jesse Eisenberg is helming The Debut, and Aaron Sorkin is returning with the long-awaited follow-up, and they’re all hitting at roughly the same time. Somehow, that gives us an unofficial Social Network reunion spread across three different films.
The timing makes the comparison even more interesting. The Social Reckoning looks back at Facebook’s damage through the lens of the 2021 Facebook Files, while Artificial is arriving as AI continues to change almost week by week. That gives Guadagnino’s movie a much more immediate charge, and even some critics who responded positively to Sorkin’s film have pointed out the difference.
Audiences will get The Social Reckoning on Oct. 9, with Artificial following on Christmas Day. I did not expect the 2026 movie schedule to give us two competing heirs to The Social Network. I definitely didn’t expect the one without “Social” in the title to be winning the argument, but here we are.