Word is that Aaron Sorkin wants Anora’s Mikey Madison and The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White to appear in his sequel to The Social Network.
If screenwriter and filmmaker Aaron Sorkin gets his way, then Anora star Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White, whose career’s cooking following the success of TV drama The Bear, will star in a sequel to 2010’s The Social Network.
Sorkin first talked about his ‘further adventures of Facebook’ movie in April 2024, when it was described by industry sources as a “Social Network-adjacent screenplay.” Since then, things seem to have moved on a bit, with Sorkin said to be directing as well as writing, and Sony Pictures handling distribution.
According to Deadline, which has the news on Madison (pictured above) and White’s potential roles, the film will be based on Jeff Horowitz’s Wall Street Journal article The Facebook Files, published in 2021. That investigative piece laid bare the inner workings of the social media giant, its algorithms, and how much it knew about the spread of divisive and even dangerous content on its platforms. Sorkin’s film could also explore Facebook’s alleged impact on the January 6th Capitol attack.
“Facebook has been, among other things, tuning its algorithm to promote the most divisive material possible,” Sorkin said on a podcast last year. “Because that is what will increase engagement. That is what will get you to — what they call inside the hallways of Facebook – ‘the infinite scroll’ … There’s supposed to be a constant tension at Facebook between growth and integrity.”
If deals are made, then it’s thought that Mikey Madison will play a whistleblower who helped expose Facebook’s practices, while White will play the WSJ’s Jeff Horowitz. It’s currently unknown whether Jesse Eisenberg will return to play Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The original Social Network, directed by David Fincher, was a frostily stylish origin story about Zuckerberg and the creation of Facebook, with the co-founder portrayed as a socially-awkward computer whizz whose creation was essentially born out of a series of petty grudges.
Since then, Facebook has grown into a behemoth, also taking in such platforms as Instagram and WhatsApp; like the rest of Silicon Valley, it’s also been overtaken by all sorts of weird ideas, including its money-losing flirtations with the metaverse and, most recently, a pair of AI-powered spectacles. The speculative fever around AI is such that Zuckerberg reportedly offered an executive at OpenAI $1bn to join his company. Again: things are getting weird in Silicon Valley.
It’s still early days for what Deadline calls The Social Network Part II. We’ll keep you posted.
