Well, that stung — The Social Reckoning is a major box office face-plant
Sony’s Facebook drama The Social Reckoning limped through its North American debut, trailing the film that inspired it as Jessica Chastain’s Other Mommy took the weekend.
Right, so The Social Reckoning has landed, and let’s just say no one at Sony will be rushing to update their LinkedIn after this one. Their highly touted Facebook drama stumbled out of the gates with a $5.5 million debut in North America, not only missing the studio’s already underwhelming targets but finishing a distant fifth for the weekend. No one expected a blockbuster, but this was supposed to do at least a bit better than a faceplant.
If you were hoping for a shock twist in the global numbers – no dice. Overseas wasn’t much kinder, with just $3.5 million trickling in from 29 different markets. That brings the worldwide launch to a lukewarm $9 million. To really pour salt on the wounds, that’s only about 39% international – not exactly conquering the world. All this, while horror flick Other Mommy absolutely blitzed the box office, hauling in $27.5 million and leaving Sony’s ‘big’ drama looking like last week’s news.
The Social Reckoning brought in $9 million worldwide on opening weekend – less than half of what analysts predicted.
Comparisons and Context
The inevitable comparison here is to The Social Network. That 2010 film, also penned by Aaron Sorkin, opened to $22 million domestically and ended up with a colossal $224 million global take. It also swept four Oscars, just for perspective, and that’s not even adjusting for inflation. This new one? Not even close. Sony’s latest cost less—$30 million to make, a good chunk under the original’s $40 million price tag—but it’s still no small sum when you’re taking home barely a third of it after opening weekend. Recoupling those kinds of losses is not going to be a walk in the park, especially with the early reviews being no help at all. Rotten Tomatoes has it sitting at 55%, and CinemaScore gave it a B-.
Who, What, and Why So Tepid?
So what’s the actual film? It’s not a sequel, at least according to Sony—they reckon it’s more of a ‘companion piece.’ David Fincher and Jesse Eisenberg skipped this one. Instead, we get Mikey Madison as Frances Haugen, the real-life Facebook whistleblower who passed a massive trove of internal docs to The Wall Street Journal. Jeremy Allen White is playing journalist Jeff Horwitz, and Jeremy Strong strolls in as Mark Zuckerberg. The timeline’s squarely post-pandemic: Haugen did her whistleblowing in 2021, and just to complicate things further, Meta has recently been on the hook for a $17 billion settlement over social media addiction claims. So, most viewers showing up for ‘big revelations’ already read about them in the news. And the audience? Older men, apparently—the very group still a bit skittish about going back to the cinema after lockdowns.
Add it all up, and the post-mortem boils down to a handful of reasons: a tired story, no big names back for seconds, tepid reviews, competition from films actually generating buzz, and a pandemic audience that just isn’t interested in reliving the Facebook headlines of two years ago. The end result is a film that arrived with an almighty whimper, not a bang.