It's scarier than Jason, Freddy, Art and that creepy gal from "Obsession" combined, at least to Hollywood screenwriters.
The "It" is Big Tech, or the Big Tech Bros who make it all possible, to be specific. Filmmakers are obsessed with them, and it shows in the movies coming to theaters soon.
Why? We'll get to that in a moment.
"The Social Reckoning" revisits the nerdy lad from 2010's "The Social Network. Whatever happened to that fella? Mark Zuckerberg grew up, got insanely rich and transformed into Jeremy Strong.
The "Succession" standout steps in for Jesse Eisenberg, who played the young Zuckerberg in the original film. The new "Reckoning" is all about how Facebook and other social media platforms let users flex their free speech rights to their heart's content.
The horror, the horror (and the Jan. 6 "insurrection"). That's "The Social Reckoning" in a nutshell, and it appears that writer/director Aaron Sorkin isn't pleased that Zuckerberg has so much power.
Sorkin has a point, to a degree, but he wasn't mulling this film idea until the last few years. There's a clue!
Next up is "Artificial" (Dec. 25). The film casts Andrew Garfield as tech guru Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO behind much of today's tech wonders, for better and/or worse. It's hardly a flattering portrait, by all accounts, with The Hollywood Reporter dubbing the film a "Real World Tech Nightmare."
The film even takes a swipe at Elon Musk, played by Ike Barinholtz.
Musk himself gets a dehumanizing closeup in "Musk," the latest documentary from far-Left filmmaker Alex Gibney. The early reviews suggest it's the mother of all hit pieces, another cinematic swipe at a Big Tech pioneer.
Javier Bardem's "Bunker" had its film festival debut a few weeks back but it might not bow stateside until early 2027. Either way, it's a fictional tale of a talented designer (Bardem) tasked with building a survivalist-style bunker for a tech bro gazillionaire. The designer's wife (Bardem's real-life spouse Penelope Cruz) strenuously objects to her hubby selling his soul for a big commission.
Hmmm.
Last year's "Mountainhead" brought four tech bro gazillionaire buddies to a ski resort to brag, backstab and prove out morally bankrupt each could be.
Sense a pattern?
Now, Big Tech types are ripe for satirical swipes. Some are geeky and cold, while others seem more attached to robots than actual humans.
There's another reason for the pile-on approach. Musk is on Team Trump. Mostly. Zuckerberg ditched the uber-biased fact-checking element of Facebook in recent years. Amazon's Jeff Bezos cozied up to the Trumps via "Melania," the documentary that Bezos paid a pretty penny to fund.
Hollywood and the Left loved it when tech bros opened up their wallets wide for Democrat politicians. Heck, they collectively adored Musk for his Tesla innovations, a massive shot in the arm to electric vehicles.
Now? Not so much, in case the firebombings and endless anti-Tesla stickers were any clue.
The chances of a Hollywood film capturing the upside of the modern tech bro is between slim and none moving forward. And everyone knows where slim went.
