Even Tom Cruise’s Digger isn’t falling this fast — The Social Reckoning tanks at box office
The Social Reckoning’s box office slump deepened over the weekend, falling faster than a fellow October release — and the comparison doesn’t flatter it.
Not every awards-bait drama manages to find an audience, and this month, it looks like The Social Reckoning is the latest to trip over its own feet at the box office. The film, heavy on journalism and whistleblowers, continues to slide down the charts after a fairly lukewarm debut – and its recent numbers have actually dropped even faster than Tom Cruise’s October offering, Digger. If you love a good flop watch, this is shaping up to be a properly textbook case.
The Social Reckoning fell 69.1% in its third weekend, with North American sales now at $8.28 million.
The Numbers Game
Let’s make sense of where things stand. Over the October 16–18 weekend, The Social Reckoning picked up just $1.55 million in the US and Canada, down a sharp 69.1% from its previous weekend. For context, the total North American tally is now $8.28 million, and globally, we’re looking at about $14.28 million (that includes $6 million from everywhere outside the US and Canada). That sort of drop-off would sting for any film, but especially one that Sony probably hoped would pick up heat as awards season approaches.
The film launched on 9 October in 2,606 cinemas, opening with $5.02 million domestically—already on the soft side for a would-be prestige picture. Its long Indigenous Peoples’ Day weekend haul did tick up to $5.58 million, but the appetite seems to have faded nearly as soon as it began. In its third weekend, the film’s per-cinema average slumped all the way down to just $594—so you can guess how empty some of those auditoria must have felt.
Digger Still Has the Edge
Now, Digger—the Tom Cruise film from Warner Bros.—also had a rough patch, with domestic takings plunging 71.3% over the same weekend to just $920,000. Still, Digger’s overall North American box office is at $17.24 million, and factoring in $24.5 million from abroad, it’s sitting comfortably at a global haul of roughly $41.74 million. That puts it miles ahead of The Social Reckoning in terms of total revenue, even after both took a tumble. In short, Digger’s box office slide hasn’t stopped it from absolutely smashing its thematic rival. Wherever you check the scoreboard, Sorkin’s latest has some serious catching up to do.
Tech Scandal on the Big Screen
For those not keeping track, The Social Reckoning marks a bit of a pivot for writer-director Aaron Sorkin. Instead of focusing on the founding of Facebook, as he did with The Social Network, here we get the story of the people who actually revealed what was going on inside Zuckerberg’s empire. Mikey Madison steps in as Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, Jeremy Allen White plays Wall Street Journal investigative journalist Jeff Horwitz, and Jeremy Strong—because who else—puts on the hoodie as Mark Zuckerberg himself.
The plot builds around the real-life reporting at the heart of the Wall Street Journal’s 2021 Facebook Files exposé, digging into the platform’s business practices and the claims of harm swirling round its name. All the right ingredients for topical drama, but as box office maths goes, it hasn’t exactly thrilled the ticket-buying public so far.