For a while it looked like a pair of fall flicks about odious software tech billionaires (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Open AI’s Sam Altman) bringing harm to democracy and general western culture might battle each other for award-season prominence as well as box-office bucks.
But according to a recent, apparently accurate Tatiana Siegel / California Post story, the battle is over before it’s even begun.
Amazon and Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, the Altman flick, is throwing in the towel by opting for an early ‘27 release date and thereby surrendering to Aaron Sorkin’s Zuckerberg drama, The Social Reckoning (Sony, 10.6).
The irony is that Artificial tells a far scarier, much more unsettling saga (i.e., the coming engulfment of everyone and everything by artificial intelligence) than The Social Reckoning, which is based on the 2021 Facebook leak by whistleblower Frances Haugen — a chilling revelation about Zuckerberg’s willingness to undermine democracy, albeit several years ago.
Sorkin’s film is basically an urgent, presumably gripping, looking-back drama that unfolded during the Covid era while Guadagnino’s is a looking-forward, “whoa, mama”, cautionary tale that’s happening right effing now.
And yet Amazon, it seems, is candy-assing out because they believe that Joe and Jane Popcorn are too lazy-brained to grasp the ominous implications of the Altman drama.
That plus a suspicion that Joe and Jane won’t want to grapple with two dramas about billionaire big-tech bad guys during the same season. Please…too challenging!
Obviously these are two different subjects and a hell of a double bill, but Amazon doesn’t want to go up against Sony’s Sorkin saga, which Joe and Jane will presumably feel more responsive to given the link to 2010’s The Social Network, the grade-A Sorkin-scripted Zuckerberg drama that David Fincher directed.
