Hollywood's Latest Films Cast Zuckerberg, Musk and Altman in a Dark Light

A wave of films is putting some of Big Tech's most powerful figures under scrutiny, and the portraits are largely unflattering, according to CNBC. Three titles lead the way: Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning on Mark Zuckerberg, Alex Gibney's documentary Musk on Elon Musk, and Luca Guadagnino's Artificial on Sam Altman. They arrive as public concern grows over AI and the data centers that power it.

Three Films, Three Different Kinds of Scrutiny

Although the projects are often discussed together, they approach their subjects in very different ways. One is a scripted sequel in spirit to a celebrated hit, one is a documentary that has already prompted a legal warning, and one is a boardroom drama built around a single dramatic week in the AI industry. What links them is timing. Each reaches audiences at a moment when questions about technology, power and accountability are no longer confined to business pages, and the filmmakers have chosen to examine the people at the top rather than the products.

Sorkin Returns to Facebook, This Time Through a Whistleblower

Sony's The Social Reckoning opens this weekend. It is a follow-up in spirit to Sorkin's 2010 film The Social Network, but it focuses on the 2021 leak by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who exposed internal company documents. Where the earlier film followed the creation of a company, this one concerns what the company became and what insiders say it knew about its own effects.

Jeremy Strong plays Zuckerberg after Jesse Eisenberg, who played him in 2010, declined to return, Yahoo reports. The recasting removes a direct link to the earlier film, and it places the new picture on its own terms rather than as a continuation of the same performance.

Early commercial and critical signals are modest. The film is projected to open to around $7 million, and Forbes reports it holds a 56% score on Rotten Tomatoes from 178 reviews, a split verdict that suggests reviewers are far from united. Zuckerberg has not publicly responded to his portrayal, and you can read about its box office start in our opening report.

A Documentary Draws a Legal Warning

Gibney's documentary Musk has drawn strong reviews, and Forbes reports that The Hollywood Reporter praised it while describing a deeply unsettling portrait of its subject. Its path to audiences has been far from quiet, however.

Ahead of its release, Musk's lawyer Alex Spiro sent Gibney a letter warning of possible legal action over a segment in which Musk's ex Ashley St. Clair implies he used Starlink to rig the 2024 election. The letter says the insinuation is false and that Starlink was not connected to vote tabulation, according to TNND. The claim in question is an implication made by one of the documentary's interview subjects, and the letter from Musk's side rejects it directly. Forbes reports that Musk has called the film a hit piece.

The documentary is not the only front on which Musk is confronting the industry's story about itself. He is also suing OpenAI and Altman over the company's shift to a for-profit structure, a dispute that gives the autumn's tech-focused films an unusual real-world backdrop.

The Drama Behind Altman's Brief Exit

Neon will release Artificial at Christmas. Andrew Garfield plays Altman in a drama about his brief removal as OpenAI's chief executive in 2023. Musk is also portrayed, along with other AI figures including Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amodei, Forbes reports.

The film premiered at the New York Film Festival, and Altman was critical of it in a Vanity Fair interview earlier this week. His reaction is notable because, unlike Zuckerberg, he has chosen to engage with the portrayal publicly before most audiences have had the chance to see it. The film's holiday release date also places it in the middle of the traditional awards-season calendar, when prestige dramas compete for attention.

The overlap in casting of real people adds another layer. Musk appears as a character in Artificial and as the subject of his own documentary, while also being a litigant against the company at the center of the drama. Viewers who follow all three films will see the same names from several angles, shaped by different directors and different storytelling choices.

Why the Mood Has Changed

Mother Jones notes that the 2010s wave of tech biopics, such as The Social Network, largely portrayed difficult, ambitious people, while this group of films takes a more critical view. The distinction is subtle but meaningful. A character who is brilliant, abrasive and driven can still invite admiration from an audience. A character presented as having made decisions with serious consequences for the public invites a harder question.

The wider context helps explain the shift. The release of these films coincides with growing public concern over AI and the data centers that power it, and with sustained attention to the influence of a small number of executives over how information, communication and computing are organized. Filmmakers are drawn to moments when a subject becomes a matter of public argument, and the leaders of the largest technology companies now sit squarely inside that argument.

CNBC asks whether the portrayals could shape how audiences see the men themselves. It is a fair question, and the answer is unlikely to be uniform. A well-made drama can leave a lasting impression of a public figure, sometimes more durable than news coverage, but it can also provoke a defensive reaction from viewers who feel a story is one-sided.

Interpretation Versus Record

These are the filmmakers' interpretations, and several of the subjects dispute them. That point matters for readers deciding how to weigh what they see. A dramatization compresses events, assigns motives and invents dialogue to carry a story, while a documentary selects interviews and footage to build an argument. Both can be illuminating, and neither is a neutral record. The disagreement already visible around Musk and Artificial is a reminder that the people portrayed will often tell the story differently.

The debate over AI is also on filmmakers' minds off screen, as in Ben Affleck's recent remarks. Concerns inside the film industry about how the technology could affect creative work run alongside the public's broader unease, which helps explain why these stories have found willing studios and distributors.

What to Watch Next

Several developments will indicate how far these films travel beyond their initial coverage. The first is the opening weekend of The Social Reckoning, where the projected $7 million and the mixed review score will set expectations for how audiences respond to a film about a company most people use daily. The second is whether the legal warning surrounding Musk turns into formal action, or fades as the documentary reaches more viewers. The third is the Christmas release of Artificial, which will test whether a drama about corporate governance at an AI company can hold a mainstream audience during one of the busiest periods of the movie calendar.

Taken together, the three releases suggest that Hollywood's relationship with Silicon Valley has entered a more adversarial chapter. Whether audiences agree with the portraits or push back against them, the films ensure that the personalities behind the world's most influential technology companies will be discussed in theaters as well as in boardrooms and courtrooms.