Hollywood’s obsession with Silicon Valley is about to reach a fever pitch with four major films set to take on controversial tech moguls.
What’s more: All the movies have key dates in October, resulting in a rather extraordinary thematic pileup as one California industry takes on another.
And oddly enough: Earlier this week, three of the projects released their first teaser trailers (below) within 48 hours of each other.
In Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, Jeremy Strong plays Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a sequel (or “companion piece,” as Sony insists on calling it) to The Social Network. The project opens wide Oct. 9.
In Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, Andrew Garfield portrays OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during a five-day company leadership crisis when Altman was fired and then reinstated as CEO. The Neon film premieres at the New York Film Festival Oct. 5 (and gets a limited release on Dec. 25).
Then there are two epic-length documentaries.
Alex Gibney‘s takedown of Tesla and SpaceX mogul Elon Musk, titled Musk, runs nearly four hours and is released in select theaters from Bleecker Street on Oct. 16 after premiering Tuesday at Venice.
And Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything, the surprise A24 project that dropped at Telluride, follows Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the days before she began her stint in federal prison and beyond. The three-hour film also opens in theaters on Oct. 16.
(Should we start spitballing some head-to-head release date names now? ElonBeth? MuskEverything? You Can See Elon? Perhaps not).
There’s an obvious running thread here: Silicon Valley executives as flawed egoists who speak in grandiose terms, claiming they’re helping humanity, yet seemingly value their ambition and power over ethics and safety — with potentially catastrophic outcomes.
And if one looks into November, there’s yet another project: Graham Moore’s Netflix limited series The Altruists, which follows the downfall of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and stars Anthony Boyle as co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Julia Garner as Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison.
As for whether the projects will connect with audiences, the dramas have run into some premature skepticism. The Social Reckoning trailer has drawn some unflattering comparisons to the much-loved predecessor The Social Network. Amazon MGM’s decision to drop Artificial for apparent conflict-of-interest reasons, followed by several other studios passing before Neon picked it up, has led some insiders to speculate the film might be lackluster. Neither have yet screened for even a festival audience, so it’s far too early to make any conclusions.
The preliminary buzz on the documentaries, however, is through the roof. Musk and You Can See Everything have been reviewed at their respective festival screenings and both are currently sitting at 100 percent positive on Rotten Tomatoes. (The Hollywood Reporter‘s review for Musk left our critic “simmering in outrage for 225 minutes” and our review for You Can See Everything called it “fascinatingly slippery and dizzyingly clever.”)
For years, Silicon Valley has been pledging to disrupt Hollywood (and in many cases, succeeding). Now, with this curious surge of coincidental timing, the film industry is returning the favor.
Below are the trailers for all four films: