Sorkin's "The Social Reckoning" Takes 5.5 Million Dollars on Its Opening US Weekend, a Quarter of "The Social Network"'s Start: Does Anyone Still Care About Facebook?

Aaron Sorkin went back to Facebook, but audiences didn't follow. "The Social Reckoning", the sequel to "The Social Network", is set to take just 5.5 million dollars (about 4.7 million euros) in its opening weekend in US cinemas, according to Sunday's estimates. That's below the already modest 7 to 8 million the studio had projected.

For comparison: the 2010 original opened with 22 million dollars and grossed 97 million in the US in total - at the ticket prices of the time. Sorkin won an Oscar for it, and the film became one of the most influential big-screen portraits of Silicon Valley and start-up culture.

The difference isn't only in the numbers. The first film was a story about the excitement and drama of Facebook's early days. The second is darker and heavier: it's entirely devoted to former employee Frances Haugen's decision to leak the documents that became known as the "Facebook Files". Senate hearings and algorithm changes - maybe that was never the stuff of a hit.

There are other possible explanations. The real audience for a film like this may be older viewers, who only go back to cinemas now and then. Or criticism of Facebook sounds less urgent today to people losing sleep over artificial intelligence. And the reviews simply aren't good - even those who enjoyed the film admit it's weighed down by the long monologues Sorkin is known for.

This weekend kicked off a whole autumn season of films where tech bosses are the villains. Alex Gibney's four-hour documentary "Musk" opened this weekend and took 69,000 dollars in four cinemas. Next weekend brings Nathan Fielder's documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, "You Can See Everything", while "Artificial", a drama about the turmoil on OpenAI's board, has found a new distributor after Amazon dropped it. In November Netflix releases "The Altruists", a series about Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX.

Hollywood clearly thinks the time has come to settle scores with Silicon Valley. Audiences, for now at least, aren't buying tickets for it. And would we in the Balkans pay for a ticket to spend two hours watching a film about the algorithms we hand our time to every day?