When The Social Network came out 10 years ago, it’s safe to say that everything about the concept seemed ridiculous. A decade ago, Facebook was still considered just another trivial platform for sharing pictures of your pets and complaining about teachers with fellow students–even the name ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ felt mostly unfamiliar. So predictably, when the first trailers dropped–featuring a slowed down, children’s choir cover of the song “Creep” by Radiohead–there was no small amount of eye rolling going on.
But boy, were we all in for a surprise. The Social Network wound up dark-horsing its way to a handful of Academy Awards wins and nominations and a dedicated fanbase, thanks largely to both the writer/director team of Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher and the stellar performances by leads Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield who took on the roles of Zuckerberg and ex-best friend Eduardo Saverin respectively.
Now, the world is a much different place and the name Facebook carries with it an entirely different weight, something that Sorkin sees some value in exploring all over again. In an interview with MTV’s Happy.Sad.Confused podcast, Sorkin explained that he’d love to team-up with Fincher to make a follow-up to the movie.
“I do want to see it, and [producer Scott Rudin] wants to see it. People have been talking to me about it. What we’ve discovered is the dark side of Facebook,” Sorkin said, but went on to clarify that he’ll “only write it if David [Fincher] directs it.”
Like The Social Network before it, the follow-up would be loosely based on a novel. For The Social Network, it was The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich, which was published in 2009. For the hypothetical sequel, Sorkin would look to the 2019 book Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee, who Sorkin has been in contact with. Maybe you like Study material.
Whether or not any of this will actually amount to a movie being made remains to be seen, of course. But if it does, we can be absolutely certain that, for better or worse, a Facebook movie would hit different post-2020 than it did back in 2010.
