Hollywood turns on big tech — at least on screen

By Zoe Sottile, CNN

(CNN) — Sam Altman thinks the upcoming movie about him looks terrible.

“I did see the movie trailer,” the OpenAI founder recently told CNBC of “Artificial,” which comes out this Christmas. “I mean, it looks like an awful movie, but I appreciate people’s creativity, and I really do support that.”

The Luca Guadagnino-helmed biopic starring Andrew Garfield as Altman is just one of a rash of major films this year tackling the small cadre of eccentric tech founders who increasingly dominate public and private life. In the next few weeks, audiences will also be treated to Jeremy Strong as a painfully awkward and domineering Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Reckoning,” Aaron Sorkin’s long-awaited sequel to “The Social Network,” as well as “Musk,” an exhaustive 4-hour documentary by Alex Gibney about the wealthiest man in the world. Then there’s the downfall of jailed crypto founder Sam Bankman-Fried coming soon to Netflix via a series called “The Altruists,” and a mysterious documentary by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim about disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. It’s a tech movie bonanza.

Tech founders used to be our saviors, the geniuses we were told would usher in a new era of connection and productivity. Now, they’ve lost their luster as the industry itself faces a reckoning, at least in public opinion. As AI spawns a more horrifying headline every day, a vast majority of Americans now say they’re more concerned than excited about AI and about data centers, according to a recent CNN poll.

The tech bro film trend speaks to the “well-founded resentment from so many Americans that they are watching these elites, these people who live in a bubble, who are wealthier than God, wealthier than they will ever be, foist technology on them that they don’t necessarily want in their lives,” said Katie Drummond, the editor-in-chief of WIRED.

“People are looking for outlets to express that, and there aren’t very many,” she said.

Rise of the machines

“The Social Network” is the foundational tech bro film, the genesis of the genre. Sorkin’s 2010 best picture nominee follows Zuckerberg from his awkward Harvard days, when he started what would eventually become Facebook, originally a website to rate his female classmates by attractiveness. Jesse Eisenberg’s version of young Zuckerberg is a jerk, a selfish striver who’s rude to his girlfriend and betrays his best friend (played by Garfield, in his first flash of tech bro fame).

But the antihero also has a boyish, brash energy that makes him empathetic at turns; he’s fun to watch. (Still, Zuckerberg was no fan of the film, saying he found it “hurtful.”)

Strong, on the other hand, portrays Zuckerberg circa 2021, after he’d already been a billionaire for more than a decade and faced a cascade of scandals that made the backstabbing of “The Social Network” look like child’s play. His version of Zuck — complete with tiny micro-bangs — is almost painfully stiff, an unlikeable tyrant, a darker portrayal that shows how completely the tech honeymoon has ended.

The widespread — but not universal — public “enthusiasm and that positivity and that trust has eroded in a way that right now feels irreparable,” Drummond said.

Hollywood’s portrayal of tech has gone through several phases, said Joe Street, a film scholar who wrote the book “Silicon Valley Cinema.” In the halcyon early 2010s — when Zuckerberg was, if pilloried in the “Social Network,” also lauded as Time’s Person of the Year — shows like HBO’s “Silicon Valley” made tech founders seem like hapless nerds. The 2013 biopic “Jobs” showed its subject as a complex genius.

But in the later 2010s, there was a string of mainstream films with tech founder villains, including “Jurassic World,” “Venom” and “Terminator Genisys.” Street calls the archetype the “turbo-capitalist tech bro,” who values profit above morality and human lives. At the same time, big tech started to taste some of its first backlash. The Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in 2018, revealing how the personal data of millions of Facebook users had been used without their consent, sparking massive scrutiny.

More recently, Ed Norton has portrayed a Musk-esque billionaire in “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” and Taika Waititi a narcissistic, scamming CEO in “Free Guy.”

What unifies those films, per Street, is that the villains get their comeuppance (Irrfan Khan’s marauding tech founder character in “Jurassic World” becomes dinosaur food). “There’s a bit of almost like wish fulfillment here,” he said. In the films, the fictional founders are “ultimately dim-witted human beings — nature will bring them down.”

Now come the tech bro films of 2026 — which are fundamentally different. Instead of parodying tech founders in fictional stories, they take on real lives of men who, far from receiving their comeuppance, are more powerful than ever.

Ineffective altruism

Founders are not loving the cinematic feeding frenzy on their lives.

Musk has called the doc about him “a hit piece” devoid of integrity (his X war with Gibney and refusal to sit for an interview forms part of the film’s plot).

Zuckerberg has yet to comment on “The Social Reckoning,” though he’s still insisting “The Social Network” got his motivations all wrong (but at least got his fashion choices right).

Making films about tech giants appears to be getting increasingly tricky as the industry swallows up ever more of the economy, including the entertainment industry. Take “Artificial”: The movie was originally set to be distributed by Amazon MGM Studios, the tech giant’s film and TV branch. But Amazon dropped the film in June, saying it “will be better served if it were released by a different studio.” The decision came a few months after Amazon inked a massive partnership with OpenAI. Amazon didn’t respond to a question about whether the decision to drop “Artificial” and the OpenAI partnership were linked.

“Artificial” was eventually salvaged by a much smaller distributor, NEON, and is set to premiere in theaters on Christmas. NEON and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment.

Drummond said she found the resuscitation of “Artificial” to be “heartening” but “there are these, like flashing yellow or yellow-red warning signs that all is not well.”

Altman, for his part, seems to understand why the apocalyptic AI headlines might make him a target for derision, and he can take a joke at his expense. Or so he says. “I get why people have anxiety,” he told CNBC. “If they need to like project that anxiety on someone or have like a little bit of relief and poke fun at me, it doesn’t bother me.”

As AI threatens to decimate creative jobs, “Hollywood is really quite threatened by Silicon Valley at an industrial level,” said Street, the film scholar. Films that criticize tech founders are “almost like a warning to us, but also it’s a way of them reasserting Hollywood’s importance in our culture.”

If studios are wary on the one hand of angering tech leaders with unflattering portrayals, on the other they’re clearly anticipating audience interest in stories about some of the most powerful men of our time.

Part of that could be a way for everyday people to channel “the anger and disillusionment and alienation” at the tech behemoths that seem omnipotent — and particularly at the rapid proliferation of AI, Drummond said.

“Wouldn’t it be nice on a Friday night to go see a movie that allows you to sort of channel some of that fury towards Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, or Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman?” she said. “You want to feel some sense of validation that your anger is well-placed, and I think these movies are going to provide that kind of outlet for audiences.”

And, after all, Hollywood loves a villain.

“Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman and Elon Musk, for very good reason, make for very good villains in film,” Drummond said.

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