Margaret Mitchell
Yesterday, a teaser dropped for Artificial, a biopic directed by Luca Guadagnino based on Sam Altman’s brief ouster from OpenAI in 2023. Earlier this summer, a trailer was released for The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s Meta drama, which is a follow-up to his 2010 film about Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, The Social Network. And in the past few days, audiences at the Venice and Telluride film festivals have been hyping up Nathan Fielder’s documentary You Can See Everything about the Theranos founder/fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, as well as Alex Gibney’s Musk documentary. (Gibney made an earlier documentary about Holmes, who has already been the subject of a biopic, played by Amanda Seyfried in The Dropout.)
Everything – from politics to romance to religion to tech – is converging under the umbrella of “entertainment”
You wonder whether there was an orchestrated effort to release these trailers all around the same time, or if that’s just the way film festival season works. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were the former. It’s as if Hollywood has applied the logic of film franchising, where one box-office success or bestselling novel spawns innumerable offshoots, to create a Silicon Valley cinematic universe.
