Why Hollywood can’t stop making movies about tech

The people selling us the future are having a bit of an image problem right now: AI companies are promising to transform work while workers worry about losing their jobs. Social platforms have become fixtures of daily life even as questions about their influence on people and politics persist. And the founders behind them are increasingly part of the controversy themselves. Which makes this a pretty interesting moment for Hollywood to put them on a much bigger screen, don’t you think?

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

This fall and winter, Hollywood is turning its cameras on four of tech’s most consequential and controversial founders: Meta‘s Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla and SpaceX‘s Elon Musk, OpenAI‘s Sam Altman, and Theranos‘ Elizabeth Holmes. Their stories are wildly different, spanning social media, electric cars and rockets, artificial intelligence, and convicted fraud. But the films have a common question at their center: What happens when someone promises to change the world, and millions of people, investors, and institutions decide to believe them?

The founders are getting their close-up. The audience is already skeptical.

When The Social Network first arrived in 2010, Facebook’s beginnings supplied plenty of drama. But writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, opening Oct. 9, has a different perspective than his movie from over a decade ago. As he put it: “‘The Social Network’ was about the invention of Facebook. ‘Social Reckoning’ is about what it’s become and, in particular, Facebook’s role in the rise of extremism and divisiveness.”

In the film, Jeremy Strong takes on Zuckerberg, with Mikey Madison playing Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen and Jeremy Allen White as Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, and is set to follow the disclosures behind the newspaper’s “Facebook Files” investigation, tracing what Facebook actually knew about the harms of its platforms, and what happened when that information became public.

But since 2021, the allegations about harm to young users have hardly faded. In August 2026, Meta agreed to a settlement worth up to $17.1 billion with a coalition of attorneys general over claims that it knowingly built addictive features that harmed children and teens. The agreement, subject to court approval, also requires new restrictions on minors’ use of Facebook and Instagram.

That is part of the history audiences bring to the movie theater. As Meta’s platforms have become woven into how we talk, get news, and spend our time, scandal after scandal has given users reasons to question the company’s influence. Concerns about social media’s power are widespread: A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 78 percent of Americans believed social media companies had too much power and influence in politics, up from 72 percent in 2020.

The pushback goes beyond what’s on our feeds. People across the country, on both sides of the political aisle, have been resisting the technologies becoming part of their everyday lives.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Whether they’re fighting data centers going up in their communities, protesting or vandalizing Flock Safety cameras, or dubbing Meta’s smart glasses “pervert glasses” online, people aren’t simply buying into the future tech companies are selling anymore.

AI has its own skeptics. A June 2026 survey found that 52 percent of Americans were more concerned than excited about its growing use in daily life. The distrusted tech now has its own movie as well, adding to this slate. Artificial, director Luca Guadagnino’s drama about Sam Altman’s 2023 firing and return to OpenAI, is set to take audiences inside the fight over who gets to run one of the companies shaping that technology. Andrew Garfield plays Altman and said making the film actually left him questioning his own use of AI.

“I got off my ChatGPT immediately,” Garfield told Jimmy Kimmel Live! in September, explaining that learning more had made him realize “we’re careening into some very unknown territory.”

“They’re not an evil person, they’ve got blinkers on.”

It’s easy to see why these stories draw us in. There’s money, competition, and the conviction that you’re building something important enough to change everyone’s lives. A founder may see that ambition as heroic, though for the people living with the consequences, it can look very different. Ron’s Gone Wrong co-writer Peter Baynham told WIRED in 2023 that the film’s contrasting tech executives reflected how these figures can see themselves as the good guys.

“They think they’re on a heroic mission to make the world a better place,” he said. “They’re not an evil person, they’ve got blinkers on.”

To me, that’s a more interesting character to watch than someone who simply wants to do harm — someone so convinced they’re helping that they stop questioning what their version of progress costs everyone else.

No one better epitomizes that ideal than Elizabeth Holmes. If you watched The Dropout, you know what I mean. Holmes promised to revolutionize blood testing through her startup, Theranos, and went to extraordinary lengths to sell investors on technology that could not do what she claimed. That deception led to her conviction for defrauding investors.

Now she’s the subject of You Can See Everything, a documentary opening Oct. 16 from directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. It follows Holmes in the 34 days before she reported to prison for

+her TK-year sentence, with the equally uncomfortable-to-watch Fielder — whose Nathan for You and The Rehearsal turn awkwardness into must-watch television — joining her at home. If you’ve seen his work, you can imagine why that pairing is hard to resist.

Holmes won’t be the only tech figure appearing as herself this fall. Audiences will also get a closer look at Elon Musk in filmmaker Alex Gibney’s documentary, Musk. Musk’s influence stretches from the cars people drive to the posts they see on X and the politics shaping their lives.

The film will explore his business empire and political influence, opening in New York and Los Angeles on Oct. 9 before expanding nationally. For viewers used to encountering Musk through his posts and the headlines they generate, the film offers a chance to spend more time with the story behind them.

Now, just because all these movies are arriving at the same time doesn’t necessarily mean change will follow. But they can bring scrutiny beyond the usual audience for tech news. Someone who uses ChatGPT, Facebook, Instagram, or X every day may know relatively little about the people and decisions behind those products. But what film is very good at is giving audiences a reason to look more closely at topics they may — or may not — be familiar with.

For now, I’m looking forward to seeing whether Andrew Garfield really nails Sam Altman’s (in)famous walk.