Writer-director Aaron Sorkin‘s follow-up to The Social Network as one key difference from the first film — and it’s not just that Jesse Eisenberg isn’t reprising his role as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
This time, it’s original.
The Social Reckoning will be submitted and campaigned as an original screenplay, Gold Derby can confirm exclusively, and it has been approved as such by the Writers Guild.
The film uses as source material the books by Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen (The Power of One: How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook), Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz (Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets), and Roger McNamee (Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe).
But unlike its predecessor, it is not adapted from them. The Social Network, for which Sorkin won an Oscar, was based on the Ben Mezrich book The Antisocial Network.
Screenplay submissions for the Oscars are not made to a specific writing category, per AMPAS rules, with the writers’ branch executive committee instead deferring to WGA category classification. The filmmakers have been very clear not to refer to Reckoning as a “sequel,” which would deem it adapted. Academy rules say a project is generally classified as original if the film is “an historical subject/true story in which the writer has performed their own research and used multiple sources.”
Sorkin has earned four Oscar nominations for his screenplays throughout his career — along with The Social Network, he was nominated for Moneyball, Molly’s Game, and The Trial of the Chicago 7. Of those, only Chicago 7 was original.
Before the category update, the film was tracking at No. 8 in the Gold Derby odds, so we’ll continue to monitor its standing in the race as the campaign continues.
