A steely-eyed creature sits in its lair, dark clouds looming in the distance. Several prisoners tentatively enter, gathering the courage to deliver their meagre offerings to the unflinching force before them. The offering doesn’t suffice. With one severe glance, the creature has the prisoners fleeing, desperately hoping they need not return.
This sounds like a scene from a horror film – the introduction of Hollywood’s newest flesh-eating beast. But this isn’t your average monster. It’s Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and Meta chief executive. In Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, the tech billionaire is the evil that lurks, the monster under the bed. But instead of a lair, he’s in a sterile office, emotionlessly watching overworked employees present dissatisfying statistics.
The film, a follow-up to 2010’s The Social Network (also penned by Sorkin), asks us to reconsider the definition of “monster”, suggesting it’s not fanged creatures and slasher killers we should be afraid of, but rather tech bro billionaires and their unbridled, unchecked power.
Set around the 2021 Facebook Files leak, Zuckerberg is no longer the arrogant tech nerd portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network. Now, played by Jeremy Strong (Succession), he’s a robotic, dictatorial techpreneur, intent on increasing Facebook’s engagement even if it means intensifying hate speech, spreading misinformation and damaging mental health.
The suggestion of safeguards, which could drop engagement by just one per cent, offends him. When urged to fact-check political ads on the social platform, he refuses, adamant that tech companies shouldn’t operate as arbiters of truth. Facebook, to him, is a corkboard – he can’t control what people pin to it.
Sorkin insists his Zuckerberg is an “anti-hero” rather than a villain, a person with good intentions but poor carry-through. However, Strong’s unfeeling lizard-like performance suggests otherwise.
The Social Reckoning is the first of several new movies to turn tech bros monstrous. Andrew Garfield will portray Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI, in Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, landing January 21. Tracking the early development of artificial intelligence, the film’s trailer reads like a psychological horror, as Garfield’s Altman descends into a grim basement filled with guns.
“We open Pandora’s Box together, the future is inevitable,” Garfield’s Altman says of AI in the trailer. “Countries will fall, industries are going to collapse, and we get to be the ones to shepherd people into this new world.”
It’s difficult to watch without shuddering, knowing that AI has been used to hack into government systems and to mislead using deepfakes and chatbot hallucinations. A former employee from AI safety and research firm Anthropic even warned that AI companies are “gambling with our lives”.
Garfield has acknowledged the insidiousness, telling Variety he no longer uses ChatGPT. “I got a bit scared … I felt a little mistrusting of the technology. It feels like the people who are encouraging us to use the technologies don’t exactly know its capacities themselves. That feels a little irresponsible”.
Fellow OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk has also attracted Hollywood’s attention. Alex Gibney’s Musk, a nearly four-hour documentary yet to set an Australian release, traces the tech billionaire’s stint in government and ownership of SpaceX, Tesla and X. Musk’s power is so immense that he’s described in the documentary’s teaser trailer as the “Earth’s most unchecked man” and, more concerningly, a “nuke”.
Boasting a net worth of nearly $US1 trillion, Musk is the world’s richest person, and with such wealth comes great power. Musk’s lawyers threatened to file a defamation suit ahead of the film’s release, though no suit has officially been filed.
Artificial, meanwhile, was dropped by Amazon in June shortly after the company signed a lucrative deal with OpenAI. Coincidence? Luckily, Neon picked it up. Similarly, Sony reportedly received a “strongly worded letter” from Meta after it caught wind of The Social Reckoning. Though these films will land on screens, they’ve had to fight to get there.
Perhaps the most anticipated “tech monster” to hit cinemas is Elizabeth Holmes. The disgraced Theranos founder, who’s currently in prison, will be the focus of You Can See Everything, a documentary by Nathan Fielder (The Rehearsal) and Lance Oppenheim (Some Kind of Heaven) landing on November 12. Though only acquitted for defrauding investors, Holmes’ work on the failed blood-testing startup – which provided inaccurate and unreliable blood tests – could have eventually cost lives.
Yet in the documentary’s trailer, Holmes insists she did nothing wrong and has “nothing to hide” whilst staring, unblinking, at Fielder, as if trying to consume him with her eyes alone. It’s arguably scarier than any horror film as this is a real person, who has done terrible things for the sake of money and success, and who still fails to acknowledge their ethical shortcomings.
This is where today’s tech monsters differ from tech bros of the past. Eisenberg’s Mountainhead (2025), a film about four fictional tech tycoons isolating from an economic disaster in a secluded cabin, makes light of their buffoonish behaviour and ineptitude. Jemaine Clement’s tech mogul antagonist in M3GAN 2.0 (2025) is a mash-up of Silicon Valley figures, thus explaining his larger-than-life performance that can hardly be taken seriously. Australian director Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man was arguably ahead of the curve in 2020, featuring an exaggeratedly evil tech boss who fakes his suicide and uses a camouflage suit to stalk his ex-partner.
Meanwhile, earlier films with real-life tech tycoons, such as The Social Network and Steve Jobs, depicted them more generously. Zuckerberg was a misguided nerd; Jobs was an obsessive genius. Even the fictionalised series about Holmes, The Dropout, showed her dancing to Lil Wayne at one point. They were flawed, but certainly didn’t appear to have the capacity to end the world.
It seems we can no longer hide behind such levity and fiction. From The Social Reckoning to Artificial, today’s tech bro films are beyond bleak. They capture periods that felt like rock bottom, such as when extremists (many of whom were radicalised on Facebook) stormed the US Capitol. Yet, things have only gotten worse.
While earlier films warned of what may come, these films scream: “It’s too late”. That’s scarier than any masked killer or bloodthirsty beast.
The Social Reckoning is in cinemas now. You Can See Everything will land in cinemas on November 12 and Artificial on January 21.
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