The Social Reckoning is heading for a quarter of The Social Network

Sixteen years ago, The Social Network opened to $22,445,653 from 2,771 North American cinemas, which comes out at roughly $8,100 a screen. The Social Reckoning, the follow-up Sony released on Friday, is heading for about $6m from 2,606 cinemas, or $2,300 a screen. Per cinema, 72% of the audience has gone. That is before inflation.

The $6m estimate is Deadline's, from its weekend box office report, which has Aaron Sorkin's film in fifth place. The Hollywood Reporter was tracking it at $7m on Friday. Even the friendlier figure is less than a third of the original's start, and the original sold its tickets at 2010 prices. Boxoffice Pro's long-range forecast had given it a range of $6m to $10m, so the film is landing at the floor of its own studio's expectations.

The previews called it on Thursday night. The Social Reckoning took $650,000, Variety reported. Other Mommy, Universal's horror film with Jessica Chastain, took $3.6m in the same hours, five and a half times as much, from a $19m production that critics have taken apart (18% on Rotten Tomatoes). Rob Savage's film is projected to open above $20m. It out-earned the prestige picture anyway.

The economics point the same way. Other Mommy cost $19m before marketing and is on course to return its production budget from three days in North America. The Hollywood Reporter has it on 3,200 screens, roughly 600 more than Sorkin's film, and Universal needed no good reviews to fill them. The sharper comparison is a week old: Tom Cruise took $1.2m in previews for his own adult-skewing October release, and that figure was read as soft. The Social Reckoning managed just over half of it.

Sorkin's lowest opening as a director

Sorkin wrote The Social Network and has now written and directed its successor, with Jeremy Strong taking over Mark Zuckerberg from Jesse Eisenberg, Mikey Madison as the whistleblower Frances Haugen, nineteen months after her best actress Oscar for Anora, and Jeremy Allen White as Jeff Horwitz, the Wall Street Journal reporter who published her Facebook Files in 2021. The budget is $30m by The Hollywood Reporter's count; Deadline's reporting has put the figure as high as $42m. Sony has not settled the discrepancy. This weekend makes either number uncomfortable.

Sorkin has opened a film wide as a director once before. Molly's Game went wide in January 2018, opened to $6.9m and finished on $59.3m worldwide. If Deadline's estimate holds, The Social Reckoning opens under it, and a film carrying a reigning Oscar winner, two of television's biggest leading men and the best-known company on earth as its subject becomes the lowest opener of Sorkin's directing career. His other two features, The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Being the Ricardos, were sold to streamers. That looked like a pandemic accident at the time. It reads like a market call now.

The Fincher-sized gap

The original had David Fincher directing Sorkin's script. It carried a 96% Rotten Tomatoes score into its October 2010 opening, finished with $224.9m worldwide on a $40m budget, and converted eight Oscar nominations into three wins. The follow-up has Sorkin directing Sorkin, 56% on Rotten Tomatoes across 188 reviews and a Metacritic score of 52. The critics' consensus line on Rotten Tomatoes calls it "an urgent warning that feels like it's arriving a little too late". Exhibitors would put it less politely.

The multiplier arithmetic offers no rescue. The Social Network turned its $22.4m start into $97m domestic, a run of 4.3 times its opening, built on word of mouth and an awards campaign that lasted into February. Give the follow-up the same legs on a $6m start and it finishes near $26m domestic, still short of the lower of its two reported budgets. And films that open to poor notices do not get the original's legs. They get less.

The dates make the timing problem precise. Frances Haugen unmasked herself on 60 Minutes on 3 October 2021 and testified before the Senate two days later; the film dramatising those weeks opened on 9 October 2026, five years on almost to the day. The story it tells was covered live, litigated in Congress and absorbed into the public's settled view of Facebook years ago. A thriller needs the audience not to know the ending. Everybody knows this one, including how little changed after it.

A $30m adult drama dated 9 October is priced and placed for awards season, and no campaign runs on a 56. That is the actual lesson of this weekend, not a verdict on Facebook stories. Adult-skewing films still open when the notices arrive: Primetime beat Mickey 17's opening day in September on an eighth of the budget, and Tom Cruise's Digger, whose break-even arithmetic is its own problem, still opened to about $8m on reviews far warmer than these. For this audience, the notices are the sell. The Reckoning did not get them.

The film skipped the autumn festivals and premiered instead at the Curzon Mayfair in London on 29 September, which read at the time as confidence and reads now as a campaign already managing expectations. Venice launched The Social Network's awards run in spirit if not in fact; nothing is launching this one.

Final weekend actuals are published on Monday 12 October. After that, Sony decides how long to hold 2,606 screens for a film returning about $2,300 from each of them.