Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning” Trailer Reveals Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg in “Social Network” Follow-Up

The first trailer for Aaron Sorkin‘s The Social Reckoning opens up on a young woman, Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), speaking with Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White). “Before I go on, I want to make something clear,” Haugen says, “I am here to help Facebook, not hurt it.” It seems like a fairly innocuous and routine moment in a reporter’s life—he or she gets a tip, follows up, finds a nervous, perhaps unreliable person on the other end. But it turns out that Haugen is not unreliable, and the story she has to tell Horwitz is both damning and global in its implications.

Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning is his companion piece to his Oscar-winning 2010 film The Social Network, which he wrote and David Fincher directed, and was centered on the heady, contentious early days of Facebook. It turned out that, for both Mark Zuckerberg—played in the first film by Jesse Eisenberg and now, 16 years later, by Jeremy Strong—and the rest of the world, the early days of Facebook were the easy bits. The Social Reckoning, written and directed by Sorkin, is concerned with what happened to Facebook, and to us, in the years after it became the world’s biggest social network. Primarily, Sorkin has crafted his film around Horwitz’s explosive Wall Street Journal exposé, “The Facebook Files,” published in 2021 and sourced from Haugen, a young engineer who revealed the social network’s harmful effects on teens and the ways Facebook was used to spread misinformation.

The trailer then takes us to the preparation for Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress after the fallout from “The Facebook Files.” Strong seems to have zeroed in on the Facebook founder’s voice and demeanor, and, in a snarky moment, capturing a note of dry deflection. When asked to state his name and what he does for the record, he responds that he’s a “professional defendant.” The prep is supposed to get Zuckerberg ready to charm his congressional interlocutors. It’s not going that great.

The Social Reckoning‘s cast is stacked—joining Madison, White, and Strong are Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, Billy Magnussen, and Bill Burr.

When asked during CinemaCon why he wanted to follow up his hugely influential 2010 film, Sorkin had this to say: “There isn’t a life that Facebook’s algorithm hasn’t touched, and that influence has shaped everything. So it’s time to say more.”

The Social Reckoning hits theaters on October 9. Check out the trailer below.

Featured image: Jeremy Strong is Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Reckoning.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.