ixteen years ago The Social Network was released and the first stirrings of a new cinema archetype were seen: the tech-bro villain. Perhaps that's too damning a description for the Mark Zuckerberg portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg in David Fincher's 21st-century classic about the dawn of Facebook; he's certainly not a villain in the mwah-ha-ha, moustache-twirling sense. But he is, at the very least, on the wrong side of antiheroic: brilliant, brittle, status-craving, cruel and in charge of a social network with an exploding user base. Back then of course, the ramifications of this combination of troubling personality traits and transformative technology hadn't quite dawned on us all: to many, social media sites still seemed a societal net positive. But the character was chilling enough to give even the most Pollyanna of tech evangelists a moment of pause.
Fast forward to 2026, when faith in social media – and technology more broadly – is at Mariana Trench lows, and a sequel to Fincher's drama has arrived in cinemas, this time both written and directed by the first film's writer, Aaron Sorkin. The Social Reckoning whizzes the action forward to the tail end of the 2010s, by which time Facebook has grown into a near-trillion-dollar monolith. It follows real-life data engineer Frances Haugen (played by Mikey Madison), whose concerns over the radicalising qualities of Facebook's algorithm prompt her to leak confidential files to investigative journalist Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), resulting in the release of the Wall Street Journal's Facebook Files. Right around the same time as this damaging publication, and also depicted in the film, is the small matter of a riot-slash-insurrection at the Capitol, egged on by the outgoing US president on, among other places, Facebook, prompting his belated ban from the platform by Zuckerberg.
The stakes for The Social Reckoning then are immeasurably higher than those of its predecessor, which ultimately concerned corporate manoeuvres at a swiftly growing but still small-potatoes company; not nothing, but definitely not overthrowing-the-government levels of drama. Zuckerberg has transformed too. Played in the sequel by Jeremy Strong, he does now resemble a full-on tech-bro baddie: remote, uncaring, monomaniacal and willing to blow a hole in the social fabric if it means his company can grow ever bigger. So why then does he feel less threatening than Eisenberg's Zuckerberg?
Partly it comes down to the performance. As sensational as Strong can be, his Zuckerberg feels strangely undercooked, the robotic mannerisms on point, but the matter of the character badly lacking. At times he seems to revert to Kendall Roy (his character in Succession) at his most dead-eyed, rather than conjuring something new. It probably doesn't help that Sorkin's script shifts Zuckerberg to the side for much of proceedings – an absent, ambiguously defined monster to be slayed by the film's heroes. But there's a larger problem too, I think, and it's one that's hardly unique to The Social Reckoning: in 2026, tech bros don't make for terribly great baddies.
There were enough of them last year, in everything from Jesse Armstrong's Succession follow-up Mountainhead, to The Naked Gun remake, for the Guardian to declare the tech bro "Hollywood's go-to baddie of 2025", though Vulture reckoned that "every movie villain was (still) a tech bro" as far back as 2022. And the coming months promise an absolute deluge of them: alongside The Social Reckoning, there's Artificial, Luca Guadagnino's film about OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman (played by Andrew Garfield); The Altruists, a Netflix series about the fall of cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried; and The Audacity, a HBO comedy on an unhinged and scandal-ridden tech CEO. Plus two very high-profile documentaries in the form of Alex Gibney's Musk and Nathan Fielder's hotly anticipated Holmes film You Can See Everything (pictured above).
Some of those films and series are likely to be great (Artificial has received positive reviews out of the New York film festival), as some have been before. But it's hard not to feel a little fatigued by the trend at this stage. There are only so many slick but socially awkward, jargon-spouting masters and mistresses of the universe you can witness before the whole trope becomes dull and unilluminating. Tech CEOs aren't often visually interesting either, with their muted-coloured quiet-luxury dress sense. And there's a familiar endpoint to them too: imprisonment, scandal or, most likely, the software they have foisted on everyone spiralling out of their control. Inevitably the tech becomes as much a villain as its maker.
But that's arguably even less interesting – as the spate of evil AI movies in recent times has shown. Anyone who watched Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning would surely agree that the all-conquering, nuke-deploying bot that serves as antagonist for much of the film was sorely lacking when compared to former flesh-and-blood villains like Henry Cavill's moustachioed malcontent in Fallout or Philip Seymour Hoffman's brilliant baddie in M:I3 – men animated by violence and spite as much as world domination. Give us them over the robots – or the robotic tech CEO – any day.
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