Sixteen years after The Social Network opened to $22 million, Aaron Sorkin’s return to Facebook is off to a quiet start. The Social Reckoning made $2.15 million on Friday (Oct. 9) from 2,606 theaters and is projected to open to about $6 million, which would put it at No. 5 for the weekend, Deadline reported Saturday. Studios report their weekend estimates on Sunday.
That is the low end of expectations. The film took $650,000 from Thursday previews, and Deadline says initial projections had been about $7 million. Horror is still running October: Universal’s Other Mommy is headed for a first-place opening of about $28 million.
Read more2hollis’ Pirouette: Release Date, Tracklist, Cover Art and Everything We Know
Audiences are warmer than critics. It earned a B- CinemaScore, and its Rotten Tomatoes audience score stands at 73% against a 54% Tomatometer from 200 reviews. Metacritic has it at 52, “mixed or average.” The Rotten Tomatoes consensus calls it “an urgent warning that feels like it’s arriving a little too late” and says it “pales in comparison to its predecessor.”
The individual reviews split the same way. Variety’s Guy Lodge called it “a diverting-enough, clever-enough, true-enough examination,” while Deadline’s Pete Hammond praised it as a journalistic thriller in the mold of All the President’s Men.
Mikey Madison, in her first starring role since winning the Oscar for Anora, plays the whistleblower Frances Haugen opposite Jeremy Allen White as the Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, and Jeremy Strong takes over Mark Zuckerberg from Jesse Eisenberg. Alexandre Desplat wrote the orchestral score. Watch the trailer below.
The math isn’t a disaster. Deadline puts the film’s cost at $30 million after incentives, half of it financed by Alcon. But The Social Network went on to $97 million at the domestic box office in 2010, and Deadline’s Jill Goldsmith suggests the public may now care more about AI than about the ills of social media. Sunday’s estimates will show how close the opening lands to $6 million.
- Projected opening
- About $6M, No. 5 (Deadline, Oct. 10)
- Theaters
- 2,606
- CinemaScore
- B-
- Critics
- 54% Rotten Tomatoes, 52 Metacritic
