Sorkin: 'Social Reckoning' Reshoots Were to 'Make It Better'

Aaron Sorkin says the reshoots on "The Social Reckoning" had nothing to do with the mixed reaction to the film's trailer. They happened because Sony Pictures chairman and CEO Tom Rothman offered, and Sorkin wanted two more scenes.

"We weren't correcting anything," Sorkin told Vanity Fair ahead of the film's Oct. 9 release. "There are two kinds of reshoots: one is the 'Oh, we're in trouble. We need to reshoot this.' And that usually happens on $150 million superhero movies. The other kinds of reshoots are 'Oh, we really like this movie. It's good. Let's make it better.'"

Rothman asked whether Sorkin would want to reshoot anything if given the option. "Yeah, I would go back and rewrite and reshoot the whole thing," Sorkin recalled saying, before clarifying that only two scenes left him room to add something. "And so he opened the checkbook and gave us three days of shooting."

"The Social Reckoning," a follow-up to 2010's "The Social Network," stars Mikey Madison as former Facebook engineer and whistleblower Frances Haugen and Jeremy Allen White as Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz. The film follows the two as they expose the inner workings of Facebook, work that culminated in "The Facebook Files," the Journal's 2021 investigative series revealing the platform's harmful effects on teens and its role in spreading misinformation, including content linked to political violence.

The film recreates the January 6 riot, but Trump is never mentioned by name. Sorkin stands by that decision and insists no one at the studio pressured him.

"I want to be clear: I was never asked to do that, to not mention Trump by name," he said. "I turned in the script and a day or two later met with Tom Rothman, who was full speed ahead on it. And I promised him, unprovoked, that we would not see any Trump signage, no 'Make America Great Again.' The movie is about Facebook's role and the rise of divisiveness, extremism, and hyper-partisanship in the country. It is not a red-blue thing, even though, obviously, it will be felt that way."

One line of dialogue did not survive outside review. An outside legal firm hired by Sony required Sorkin to rewrite a scene in which one of Facebook's senior officials says, "I don't know what that bitch thinks she's doing," removing the expletive.

"The lawyer said, 'Unless you can show me that at one point a senior Facebook executive referred to an ex-employee as a bitch, you can't do that,'" Sorkin said. "So it was that."

Test screenings for the film were similarly constrained. Sorkin said the studio "had a real concern for secrecy," so each screening consisted of "70 people on the studio lot, all of them Sony employees." He acknowledged the limitation: "It is not a great polling sample."

The film arrives Oct. 9, and Sorkin's account makes one thing clear before opening weekend: every contested choice — the reshoots, the absent name, the softened insult — carries his signature, not the studio's.