For two decades, Hollywood treated Silicon Valley with the reverence usually reserved for astronauts and civil-rights lawyers. The founders were visionaries, the garages were shrines, the disruption was progress. That era is over.

2026 has delivered an unusually concentrated barrage of films that treat tech moguls not as flawed heroes but as something closer to villains — or at least as case studies in institutional failure. Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning reportedly reframes Mark Zuckerberg's story through the lens of democracy's near-collapse. Other features in production or recently released have taken aim at the gig economy's labor practices, surveillance capitalism, and the particular hubris of founders who believe they can move fast and break things that turn out to be, say, elections or mental health.

Why now?

The obvious answer is AI. Generative models have made the abstract harms of Big Tech viscerally concrete: jobs disappearing, deepfakes proliferating, creative work strip-mined for training data. When screenwriters went on strike in 2023, their AI demands seemed speculative. Three years later, the threat feels existential — and screenwriters have long memories.

But the shift predates ChatGPT's ascendance. The January 6th hearings, the Frances Haugen disclosures, the TikTok bans, the antitrust suits — each chipped away at the industry's claim to benevolence. Hollywood, which spent the 2010s chasing streaming dollars and treating Netflix as an ally, now sees tech platforms as competitors who devalue content and hoard data. The enemy of my enemy makes for good material.

The Sorkin problem

Sorkin's involvement is instructive. The Social Network (2010) was critical but seductive; Zuckerberg was a jerk, but a brilliant one, and the film's kinetic energy made founding Facebook look thrilling. The new project, by contrast, reportedly treats the platform's role in democratic erosion as the main event, not a subplot. Sorkin has said in interviews that he felt the original film was incomplete — that he wrote an origin story when he should have written a tragedy.

This is the broader Hollywood pivot in miniature: from "look at what they built" to "look at what they broke." The tech founder as tragic figure requires acknowledging that the tragedy was inflicted on the rest of us.

The audience question

Whether these films succeed commercially is an open question. Prestige dramas about corporate malfeasance have a mixed box-office record, and audiences may not want to spend two hours contemplating harms they experience daily on their phones. But the cultural signal matters regardless of ticket sales. When the dream factory decides an industry is no longer aspirational, that industry's recruiting pitch gets harder. The best young talent may still want to work at AI labs, but they will arrive with fewer illusions — and more lawyers.

Our take

Hollywood's tech backlash is partly self-interested and partly overdue. The industry spent years cashing checks from companies whose business models were corroding the attention spans and social fabric that make feature films viable. Now it is processing that complicity on screen, which is what Hollywood does. The films may be uneven, but the genre's emergence is itself the story: Silicon Valley has lost the narrative, and in America, losing the narrative eventually means losing everything else.