The movie business is weird like this: you can have the biggest movie of the year and the lowest earning one at the same time.
Such is the case for Sony Pictures. “Spider Man” broke all records this summer and made $2.5 billion worldwide.
Just a couple of months later, Sony has a gigantic turkey with Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning.”
The studio concedes that the Facebook movie will make just $6 million this weekend.
It’s much worse than Warner Bros.’s debacle, “Digger.” Tom Cruise must be dancing around the house that any film could steal his terrible headlines.
So many things went wrong here. First of all, attaching it to “The Social Network” as a sequel was a big mistake. The two films have nothing to do with each other.
Second, what was the point of “Reckoning”? That social media lacks ethics? We know that. That Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t care about the world? Yes, this is also pretty much understood.
That he caused the January 6th rioting to get out of hand? Yeah, maybe. But the real architect of that terrible day was Donald Trump, who almost got his vice president killed. Trump’s name is NEVER SAID in the movie. And when the film takes that turn from an otherwise dull two-hander between Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison, the audience is already lost.
The big winner this weekend? A horror film, of course. Jessica Chastain in “Other Mommy” picked up $12 million from Thursday previews and Friday opening. This thing has a 19% among critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 46% among audience members. It’s not good and no one wants to see it. But Jessica Chastain can’t always be in a prestige film. It may be her “Snakes on a Plane.”
More to come…
