TV & Beyond on 2025-06-25 20:46:45

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A sequel to David Fincher’s critically acclaimed 2010 film “The Social Network” is coming, but I regret to inform you that there’s one huge problem already.

According to an exclusive report in Deadline, Aaron Sorkin, who won an Academy Award for the first film’s script, is set to direct a movie that — as of this writing — is simply called “The Social Network II.” Journalist Justin Kroll noted that the movie isn’t a direct sequel but “rather a follow-up to the original movie that explored the origins of what would become the world’s biggest social media platform.”

Sure, the fracas surrounding Facebook and its parent company Meta — all helmed by Mark Zuckerberg, who was played smugly and perfectly by Jesse Eisenberg in the original film — is pretty interesting, but because Sorkin is set to direct, Fincher won’t be in the director’s chair this time around … and I’d be willing to bet almost anything that Eisenberg and his co-stars Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, and even Dakota Johnson probably won’t come back either. (For everyone’s sake, it’s best if Armie Hammer, who portrayed Harvard’s spoiled twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss in the original film, also keeps his distance.) “The Social Network,” which Sorkin initially adapted from Ben Mezrich’s book “The Accidental Billionaires,” is a genuinely enthralling look inside the inception of one of the world’s biggest social phenomenons, but lightning likely won’t strike twice here — not without Fincher, Eisenberg, and Garfield, at least.

Sequels without people from the first film are, by and large, a bad idea, though I’ll admit that Sorkin’s intended approach does sound sort of interesting. News has emerged, over the past several years, that Facebook may have played a huge influence in United States elections, from rumors of Russian interference in 2016 to the fact that the people who staged an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 on behalf of Donald Trump used Facebook to plan meet-ups (and were, apparently, never noticed or flagged by anyone upholding community standards of any kind). The Deadline article mentions that Sorkin specifically wants to hone in on that second point, and again, that’s an interesting angle! Still, I’m wary of the fact that Sorkin appears to be directing this alone.

When Sorkin is left to his own devices as a filmmaker, the results can be … muddled, to say the least. Let’s look at his 2020 film “The Trial of the Chicago 7” and his 2021 film “Being the Ricardos,” both of which suffer from significant bloat and, despite picking up some Oscar nods, don’t even come close to the highs (or even the lows) of Fincher’s body of work. Fincher is a director known for his incredibly specific direction; during a panel of “Mindhunter” actors years ago, I learned that when you audition for Fincher, he prefers the actor to deliver their lines in a relatively flat tone of voice and not raise their inflection on lines that include questions, so that he can look at the raw material and go from there. 

Stuff like that is why Fincher was the perfect person to direct “The Social Network,” a movie as tightly wound and as precise as possible that builds absolutely insane tension over … a couple of lawsuits and a website. Furthermore, Fincher’s exacting eye and precision are probably what kept a lot of Sorkin’s more grandiloquent, bloated impulses in check on that movie, so without Fincher on board to rein Sorkin in, it’s honestly concerning to think about what we’re going to get from this sequel. 

“The Social Network,” which is extremely good and doesn’t need a sequel, is currently available to rent or buy on major streaming platforms. If you want a real inside story of the drama behind the scenes at Facebook, try reading “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism,” a memoir penned by former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams that was released in 2025.