The Social Reckoning (2026) Review
Were you ever asking for a sequel to David Fincher’s The Social Network? Few of us were but here we are 16 years later with a sequel, titled The Social Reckoning. This is an interesting one for me because going into 2026, this was one of my most anticipated movies of the year, but the marketing did not really work for me. I was not sure what to expect going into this movie. Did I end up loving it or not? Let us talk about it!
The Review
To start off the review, I thought The Social Reckoning was an interesting watch as it was tackling a lot of very interesting and important subject matter with solid actors filling out the cast and a great screenwriter with Aaron Sorkin behind the camera also as the director. With this movie, I feel like there’s moments that work great but overall, the movie was not as captivating and as great as I felt like it could have been. As I was watching it, I kept on imagining this movie would be better if David Fincher returned to direct it. Sorkin is a legendary and acclaimed screenwriter (I took his master class) but as a director, he is not great. The scripts he wrote I thought was good, it was detailed and moved at a nice pace but add Fincher directed this script and make it feel more like a sequel to The Social Network, this easily could’ve been a top 10 movie of 2026, and now we’re left with us a good enough movie of 2026.
That was my reaction leaving the theater, the movie is good enough. It does not do anything that makes it fantastic, but it also does not do anything that makes it bad. The central story here is interesting and has a lot more layers to it than I was expecting, there were parts of this story that I did not know about. I did not know about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg’s involvement with the January 6th riots. They tie elements of that into the back half of the movie. The movie is telling two different stories at once where it is about the journalism investigation side of things while also being Zuckerberg getting ready for a trial. The two storylines are running parallel with one another, but they are happening years apart. It is told out of order with these two plot lines going on. It is an interesting movie in a few ways, and it found an interesting story to tell and found an interesting way to tell it.
With this movie, you also must talk about the performance. To me, all the performances in the movie were good. Some people were expecting some Oscar worthy performance out of this movie, from Mikey Madison and this being her first major role since her Oscar winning role in Anora. She is good in the movie, but she is not those Oscar moments that can push her to a nomination. Jeremy Allen White as a news reporter and once again, he is giving a reliable performance, him and Madison have a nice dynamic, but I do not feel like he has given those moments to really shine. The standout here is Jeremy Strong as Zuckerberg as he is a very reserved character, he is not as flashy but Strong is able to capture the mannerisms of Zuckerberg well. Strong is a great actor and so he is giving a good performance, and he does have more flashy moments. The standout here would be Bill Burr who only has scenes with Strong and a few other people. Once again, it is not this Oscar worthy performance, but he is good in the movie and he’s able to capture the vibe and energy of the movie nicely. He can keep up with these great actors despite not being an actor himself. You have this movie that is filled with great and talented actors and none of them do a bad job, but it is also a film where none of them do a great job.
You do have a script from Aaron Sorkin, and it is important to know all about the script. I thought it was a good script; it does have snappy and catchy dialogue. There’s room for jokes in there and moments of humor that got a chuckle out of me and my audience. I have not done any fact checking to see how accurate this movie was, but it feels well researched and there’s a lot of information in there that it is dumping at you, but it never feels like an exposition dump. But I think some of the individual moments, and the dialogue feels a bit over the top. There is this whole scene between Madison and White about basketball that does have payoff at the end, but the dialogue in that scene feels off and like the dialogue does not really fit the tone of the movie. I know this is a common criticism of a lot of Sorkin's scripts, and that is true here, it feels over the top and larger than life in moments where I do not think it fully works.
Final Thoughts: Overall, The Social Reckoning is not going to be one of 2026’s best movies but it is also not going to be one of the worst. I think fans of The Social Network will have a decent enough time watching this movie. But I suspect a lot of fans will agree with me on this and say that it is a good enough movie that never reaches the heights of being a great movie.
The Score: 8.0/10 (B-)
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