Academy Award winner Aaron Sorkin has reiterated his plans to write a sequel to his acclaimed drama, The Social Network, examining the origins of Facebook, one that will hone in on the social media platform’s impact on U.S. democracy.
On a just dropped episode of entertainment business podcast The Town, taped live in Washington, D.C. atr WME’s White House Correspondents Dinner pre-party last night , Sorkin said, “Look, yeah, I’ll be writing about this. I blame Facebook for January 6.”
When asked to elaborate on how the project will tackle the events of that infamous day, which saw a mob of supporters of then-U.S. president Donald Trump storming the U.S. Capitol Building, he said matter-of-factly, “You’re going to need to buy a movie ticket.”
Sorkin did share, though, that he’s been “trying” to crack the project as a film specifically. “Facebook has been, among other things, tuning its algorithm to promote the most divisive material possible, 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,” Sorkin said. “There’s supposed to be a constant tension at Facebook between growth and integrity. There isn’t; there’s just growth.”
Sources close to Sorkin stress that this project is in “very, very early stages” and has no relation to a previous January 6 project he’d spoken about making, which is no longer active.
Sorkin has repeatedly alluded to the prospect of a Social Network sequel in recent years, telling the Happy Sad Confused podcast in 2020 that he intended to examine “the dark side of Facebook” but stressing, “I will only write it if [original filmmaker David Fincher] directs it. If Billy Wilder came back from the grave and said he wanted to direct it, I’d say I’d only do it with David.”
Sorkin again teased the project in a 2021 interview with Deadline. “There’s no question that there is a story. Whether you want to call it a sequel or not, there’s a story there,” the writer said. “Whether I’m the guy to tell it or not, I’m not sure. What I mean is right now, as we speak, I would not be able to write. I don’t know quite how to tell the story, and I think it’s probably also something I wouldn’t want to do without David Fincher.”
Inspired by the Ben Mezrich book The Accidental Billionaires, the original Social Network delved into the founding of Facebook and the legal battles that followed. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer and more, the film grossed over $224M worldwide and won multiple Oscars, including one for Sorkin in the category of Best Adapted Screenplay.
