Tech Titans Own Our Eyeballs: Can Hollywood Sell Tickets to Takedowns?
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
Hollywood once mined Mark Zuckerberg’s Friend, Like, Follow problems from The Facebook origin story into a $225 million earning movie. Sixteen years later, The Social Reckoning opened to an estimated $5.5 million domestically, or a 75% drop, say roughly one-quarter of The Social Network’s debut from the same genius writer, Aaron Sorkin. Silicon Valley’s grip on our eyeballs is undisputed, but Hollywood’s portrayals of the Broligarchy is in for its own reckoning. Consider Going Clear helmer Alex Gibney’s Musk movie, beginning its shaky forecasted theatrical footprint, and Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial bro-casing Sam Altman and his embattled IPO-shy OpenAI coming to theaters at Christmas?
Perhaps the strongest hook here is the 75% drop between the two Facebook films’ domestic openings—$22.4M to $5.5M, in “nominal dollars,” but what about the female titan, now a jailbird? Convict Elizabeth Holmes offers an eye-opening potential twist.
Whereas male moguls—those tech titans of the Broligarchy—got feature films, Elizabeth Holmes’s steep downfall became Hulu’s TV-style limited series, The Dropout. Now A24 is giving the upscale imprisoned mother and wife a theatrical turn with You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary, that opens Oct.16. Are they finally giving Holmes a chance to play table stakes, or a big hand, in the poker game of big box office wins?
Is Hollywood really banking on raw curiosity about a scandal-plagued female prisoner whose blood-testing empire, Theranos delivered a spectacular fraud to fill theater seats? The title promises that we can see everything about Holmes, that notoriously opaque, if not overtly deceptive Steve Jobs female clone in his signature black turtleneck. Whether the blood-driven entrepreneur will reveal anything in terms of gross receipts at the box office is another matter.
The Dropout turned Theranos’s stunning collapse into an Emmy-winning showcase for Amanda Seyfried, but its audience stayed glued on Hulu. This distinction raises an uncomfortable question: whether tech titans make good screen villains, or do their wild antics or alleged reveals now feel like something audiences expect on streaming or online platforms, included in a subscription? Hollywood can dramatize the pratfalls and pitfalls, but selling admission to these takedowns on a Trillionaire or Billionaire in tech, may require some actual new type of story we haven’t already spent the day doom-scrolling through.
Hollywood may have swung and missed at this hot potato of mashing up the lives of tech titans who own the very mass audience platforms where movies get their viral marketing moments. Furthermore, did anyone at the studios weigh the odds of average moviegoers paying out hard-earned cash to support the life story on screen of a billionaire, like haven’t they already paid them enough in fees, subs, likes, follows, endless revenue hits on a daily basis?
Even with Sorkin’s Eisenberg-free meta trot, starring a miscast Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, tanking at the box office; and Gibney’s Musk melodrama devolving into Baby Mama side chats with less visibility than a surrogate mother? All the data isn’t in yet.
A24’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything opens Oct.16, while Artificial, featuring Sam Altman and his IPO-embroiled OpenAI legal saga, arrives literally on Dec. 25, in the feel-good Christmas movie window. Lump of coal or heart of silicon, we shall see how the boys-versus-girl box-office receipts stack up—as Hollywood pits Silicon Valley’s reigning tech titans against its rare female tech persona, now imprisoned but still posting on X from the Big House. My money is on the blood-testing entrepreneur to win the gender battle of ticket sales, stripes and all.
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