Meet the new movie villains: Zuckerberg, Musk and Altman

This coming January will mark 100 years since the great Austrian director Fritz Lang unveiled his deathless science fiction story, Metropolis. The movie was set in 2026, foreseen as a brutal world of gleaming robots and disposable humans. Above ground, the wealthy frolic in skyscrapers. Beneath it, the masses tend the machines that run the place. All this is the design of a ruthless industrialist, Joh Fredersen. The lot of the have-nots doesn’t trouble him. They are where they belong, he says.

You can imagine the response in the kinos of Weimar Berlin. Now, in the actual 2026, more boos may greet a trio of new movies about three men often seen as modern Fredersens: Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Sam Altman. First up is The Social Reckoning, sequel to 2010’s The Social Network, updating that movie’s caustic portrait of Zuckerberg. Then — in theory — comes the scalding four-hour documentary Musk. (Uncertainty has concerned the plans of international distributors Universal.) Finally there is Artificial, an account of Altman’s firing and rehiring at OpenAI in 2023.

Early feedback from the subjects has been on brand. Musk reacted furiously on X, insulting director Alex Gibney while describing the movie named for him as “a hit piece that misses”. (Nothing says that louder than enraged posts on social media.) Altman has kept his counsel, though his brother Jack may have spoken for the family by giving faint, backhanded praise to star Andrew Garfield for nailing his sibling’s walk. And Zuckerberg has not publicly acknowledged The Social Reckoning. In the wake of The Social Network, the Facebook co-founder admitted to finding it “hurtful”. Now, haughty silence speaks for the imperial CEO of Meta.

Yet even the most hostile movie can only be so frank. The famous dictum of French director François Truffaut was that it was impossible to make an anti-war film because just putting violence on screen made it a spectacle. A similar thought came to mind watching The Social Network. Zuckerberg was played by Jesse Eisenberg, jumpy but magnetic as movie stars are. By contrast, every time its real subject has appeared in public, his awkward, eerie affect reminds you why he more often doesn’t. To different degrees, the same applies to Musk and Altman. In a medium built on characters that audiences like and want to spend time with, these are films about men of which neither is generally true.

With Eisenberg choosing not to return, the lead in The Social Reckoning now goes to Succession star Jeremy Strong, a still more compelling actor. The script again comes from Aaron Sorkin, a writer whose signature is the killer line amid sexy backstairs intrigue.

For the audience, meanwhile, the story offers a charismatic bad guy equal to our current peril. Because, with the timing producers pray for, all three movies meet the zeitgeist head on. Early in Metropolis, an accident in the “machine hall” kills a swath of workers. Now AI is said to have the potential to wipe out all humanity. What more could be asked of the supervillains that represent it?

Scale matters. The Social Reckoning would feel less urgent if we knew it only led to the pathos of Meta’s “pervert glasses”. Instead, at this moment of impossible high stakes, Zuckerberg is reported to have privately urged Donald Trump to block calls to regulate AI.

We will see which side of history that puts him on, assuming someone is left to keep score. In the short term, US cinema clearly wants to be seen as speaking truth to power — a public defender in dark times, with popcorn thrown in.

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To some, that will look like just the latest flashpoint in the long, mutual distaste between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. In the same moment Zuckerberg confessed to being wounded by The Social Network, he alluded to a basic lack of understanding from the filmmakers as to what drove a tech leader. Musk being Musk, his recent attacks on Gibney only followed a niche, racially fixated campaign against Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

But the reality is two industries much closer than appearances suggest. Since the end of 2023’s Hollywood strikes, the film business has quietly embraced AI in countless ways, across pre- and post-production, and all points between. Despite the oppositional vibes, ever rarer is the movie that can truly claim to have been made without it.

Or, indeed, to have been made by companies not also in the AI business. Witness the tech boss no one has yet made a film about, Jeff Bezos, whose journey from online bookseller to gym-jacked potentate might otherwise seem ripe for it. At the same time as hugely expanding its presence in AI, Amazon’s role in film dramatically enlarged on buying legacy brand MGM. The company has had one of the year’s biggest hits with feelgood sci-fi Project Hail Mary. A large, starry autumn slate includes the movie comeback of Ali G. And once a new James Bond is finally announced, he will be making films for Bezos.

Off-screen, Amazon’s own AI products now include tools for filmmakers, as well as cloud infrastructure used by other studios. A person seeking conflicts of interest might point to Artificial, a movie that was originally an Amazon production. Then, earlier this year, Amazon agreed a $50bn investment in OpenAI. The film was dropped soon afterwards.

Unnamed sources put that down simply to perceived lack of quality. The same logic was used to explain the other studios that then passed on releasing it. (Director Luca Guadagnino is an erratic talent; the film is now to be released by independent Neon.) Still, the impression of a mass Hollywood loss of nerve did match a landscape where every studio is now busy folding AI into its operations.

That list includes Universal and The Social Reckoning’s distributor, Sony. Disney has lately advertised jobs bringing AI into its creative processes. Netflix is already well under way with that, using the technology in around 300 titles during the first half of 2026 alone. Kane Parsons, the wunderkind director whose May horror movie Backrooms became a box office sensation, has said the technology “defeats the purpose” of filmmaking. A24, the studio that funded it, now has an AI partnership with Google.

And of course, there is Paramount. Any day now, the studio looks set to finally seal the takeover of Warner Bros that will create a Hollywood behemoth. It will also give vast cross-industry power to Larry Ellison, owner of a controlling stake in Paramount Skydance, whose corporation Oracle has also driven much of the AI boom. Once the deal is done, every ticket to a “WarnerMount” film will be financially wrapped up with Oracle’s planned building of data centres worldwide.

Between them, he and Bezos will also be making a hefty proportion of all Hollywood product. It may be a long wait for the next big-league movie about flawed tech leaders.

Back in 1927, Fritz Lang ended Metropolis on a note of uplift. Ultimately, Joh Fredersen had a redemptive story arc. Real life follows its own script. Six years later, Lang fled Nazi Germany. Eventually, he settled in the US, making hard, sad, often brilliant films about moral grey zones and people’s helplessness in the face of the system.

Several are now owned by Warner Bros. As such, they will, in turn, shortly become the property of Larry Ellison. In 2026, it is perhaps where they belong.

‘The Social Reckoning’ is in cinemas from October 9; ‘Musk’ is in US cinemas from October 9; ‘Artificial’ is in US cinemas from December 25 and UK cinemas from January 22

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