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Aaron Sorkin is officially working on a sequel to The Social Network.
Last year, the Oscar-winning writer revealed he was working on a film that would revisit the subject of Facebook, and Deadline has now reported that The Social Network Part II is in development at Sony Pictures yet isn’t a “straight sequel”.
The original film, which traced the early days of Facebook and its creator Mark Zuckerberg, was directed by David Fincher. Sorkin is rumoured to be directing the follow-up.
“I blame Facebook for January 6,” he said in 2024 on a special edition of The Town podcast, live from Washington DC. When asked to explain why, he responded: “You’re gonna need to buy a movie ticket.”
The Social Network was an adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, and the sequel will be based on the Wall Street Journal series The Facebook Files. The 2021 investigation examined the damage caused by the social networking site and how internal findings had been buried. Subjects included the influence on the January 6 riot and the mental health of teenage users.
“Facebook has been, among other things, tuning its algorithm to promote the most divisive material possible,” Sorkin said. He added: “There is supposed to be a constant tension at Facebook between growth and integrity – there isn’t.
Jesse Eisenberg, who earned an Oscar nomination for playing Zuckerberg in the original, has yet to be officially attached to the project. He recently directed the Oscar-winning comedy drama A Real Pain and will next be seen in the third Now You See Me movie.
The Social Network made $224m worldwide and won three Oscars.
Zuckerberg has been critical of the film, including in a recent podcast interview.
“It was weird, man,” he said. “They got all these very specific details of what I was wearing, or these specific things correct, but then the whole narrative arc around my motivations and all this stuff were, like, completely wrong.”
Sorkin’s last film was Being the Ricardos, starring Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball.
