Hoping for a sequel to The Social Network? The ball is now in director David Fincher’s court. The Social Network writer Aaron Sorkin — who won an Oscar for his script — has said that he would love to pen a sequel to the movie about Facebook, as long as Fincher returns in the director’s chair. This isn’t the first time Sorkin has publicly discussed his interest in The Social Network 2. Now, he’s also detailed what a potential sequel would focus on, if given the opportunity.
“As far as follow-up to The Social Network — I mean it wouldn’t be so much a sequel, but anyway — people have been talking to me about it because of what we’ve discovered is the sort of, you know, dark side of Facebook,” Sorkin told MTV’s Happy Sad Confused podcast.
Sorkin added: “I met with a man named Roger McNamee, who had a book come out a year ago called ‘Zucked‘. Roger McNamee was a big early investor in Facebook. He’s a Silicon Valley VC, very interesting guy […] and became a kind of consigliere to [Facebook founder Mark] Zuckerberg right after The Social Network ends, in those years right after The Social Network ends.
“And it was McNamee, sitting on his boat going through his Facebook feed, realised there’s something strange going on here. There’s something weird that he’s noticing with the sort of the politics of the Facebook feed. And he took his concerns to Mark and he took his concerns to [Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg] and points out there’s something going on here.”
Aaron Sorkin in The Social Network
Photo Credit: Merrick Morton/Columbia TriStar
Sorkin added: “They seem uninterested in doing anything about it. Anyway, this all ends up with McNamee in a [US] Senate basement secure conference room briefing Senate Intelligence subcommittee members on how Facebook is bringing down democracy, [saying], ‘Oh, we have a huge problem here and something needs to be done about it.’
“So, yeah, do I want to write that movie? Yeah! I can tell you right now, this is by way of applying public pressure on him. I will only write it if David directs it. If Billy Wilder came back from the grave and said he wanted to direct it, no, it’s gotta be David.”
Concerns over Facebook’s impact on democratic nations and polarising politics has rapidly grown in recent years, in part due to the substantial attention to the alleged role it played in Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US Presidential election, the prosecution of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, and most recently, the rise of BJP in India and inaction over hate posts by politicians directed at Muslims.
While The Social Network was about Facebook’s founding and the lawsuits around it, this much has been made clear that The Social Network 2 will be about the impact it’s having on the world. And it makes sense that Sorkin met with another author in McNamee. The Social Network was also based on a book — 2009’s “The Accidental Billionaires” by Ben Mezrich — and Sorkin will likely adopt a similar strategy if he gets to write a sequel.
Cover image by Anthony Quintano is licensed under CC BY 2.0