Hollywood turns on big tech — at least on screen

Sam Altman thinks the upcoming movie about him looks terrible.

“I did see the movie trailer,” the OpenAI founder recently told CNBC of “Artificial,” which comes out this Christmas. “I mean, it looks like an awful movie, but I appreciate people’s creativity, and I really do support that.”

The Luca Guadagnino-helmed biopic starring Andrew Garfield as Altman is just one of a rash of major films this year tackling the small cadre of eccentric tech founders who increasingly dominate public and private life. In the next few weeks, audiences will also be treated to Jeremy Strong as a painfully awkward and domineering Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Reckoning,” Aaron Sorkin’s long-awaited sequel to “The Social Network,” as well as “Musk,” an exhaustive 4-hour documentary by Alex Gibney about the wealthiest man in the world. Then there’s the downfall of jailed crypto founder Sam Bankman-Fried coming soon to Netflix via a series called “The Altruists,” and a mysterious documentary by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim about disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. It’s a tech movie bonanza.

Tech founders used to be our saviors, the geniuses we were told would usher in a new era of connection and productivity. Now, they’ve lost their luster as the industry itself faces a reckoning, at least in public opinion. As AI spawns a more horrifying headline every day, a vast majority of Americans now say they’re more concerned than excited about AI and about data centers, according to a recent CNN poll.

The tech bro film trend speaks to the “well-founded resentment from so many Americans that they are watching these elites, these people who live in a bubble, who are wealthier than God, wealthier than they will ever be, foist technology on them that they don’t necessarily want in their lives,” said Katie Drummond, the editor-in-chief of WIRED.

“People are looking for outlets to express that, and there aren’t very many,” she said.

“The Social Network” is the foundational tech bro film, the genesis of the genre. Sorkin’s 2010 best picture nominee follows Zuckerberg from his awkward Harvard days, when he started what would eventually become Facebook, originally a website to rate his female classmates by attractiveness. Jesse Eisenberg’s version of young Zuckerberg is a jerk, a selfish striver who’s rude to his girlfriend and betrays his best friend (played by Garfield, in his first flash of tech bro fame).

Columbia/Kobal/Shutterstock

But the antihero also has a boyish, brash energy that makes him empathetic at turns; he’s fun to watch. (Still, Zuckerberg was no fan of the film, saying he found it “hurtful.”)

Strong, on the other hand, portrays Zuckerberg circa 2021, after he’d already been a billionaire for more than a decade and faced a cascade of scandals that made the backstabbing of “The Social Network” look like child’s play. His version of Zuck — complete with tiny micro-bangs — is almost painfully stiff, an unlikeable tyrant, a darker portrayal that shows how completely the tech honeymoon has ended.

The widespread — but not universal — public “enthusiasm and that positivity and that trust has eroded in a way that right now feels irreparable,” Drummond said.

Hollywood’s portrayal of tech has gone through several phases, said Joe Street , a film scholar who wrote the book “Silicon Valley Cinema.” In the halcyon early 2010s — when Zuckerberg was, if pilloried in the “Social Network,” also lauded as Time’s Person of the Year — shows like HBO’s “Silicon Valley” made tech founders seem like hapless nerds. The 2013 biopic “Jobs” showed its subject as a complex genius.

But in the later 2010s, there was a string of mainstream films with tech founder villains, including “Jurassic World,” “Venom” and “Terminator Genisys.” Street calls the archetype the “turbo-capitalist tech bro,” who values profit above morality and human lives. At the same time, big tech started to taste some of its first backlash. The Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in 2018, revealing how the personal data of millions of Facebook users had been used without their consent, sparking massive scrutiny.

Leah Gallo/Sony Pictures Entertainment

More recently, Ed Norton has portrayed a Musk-esque billionaire in “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” and Taika Waititi a narcissistic, scamming CEO in “Free Guy.”

What unifies those films, per Street, is that the villains get their comeuppance (Irrfan Khan’s marauding tech founder character in “Jurassic World” becomes dinosaur food). “There’s a bit of almost like wish fulfillment here,” he said. In the films, the fictional founders are “ultimately dim-witted human beings — nature will bring them down.”

Now come the tech bro films of 2026 — which are fundamentally different. Instead of parodying tech founders in fictional stories, they take on real lives of men who, far from receiving their comeuppance, are more powerful than ever.

Founders are not loving the cinematic feeding frenzy on their lives.

Musk has called the doc about him “a hit piece” devoid of integrity (his X war with Gibney and refusal to sit for an interview forms part of the film’s plot).

Zuckerberg has yet to comment on “The Social Reckoning,” though he’s still insisting “The Social Network” got his motivations all wrong (but at least got his fashion choices right).

Making films about tech giants appears to be getting increasingly tricky as the industry swallows up ever more of the economy, including the entertainment industry. Take “Artificial”: The movie was originally set to be distributed by Amazon MGM Studios, the tech giant’s film and TV branch. But Amazon dropped the film in June, saying it “will be better served if it were released by a different studio.” The decision came a few months after Amazon inked a massive partnership with OpenAI. Amazon didn’t respond to a question about whether the decision to drop “Artificial” and the OpenAI partnership were linked.

“Artificial” was eventually salvaged by a much smaller distributor, NEON, and is set to premiere in theaters on Christmas. NEON and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment.

Drummond said she found the resuscitation of “Artificial” to be “heartening” but “there are these, like flashing yellow or yellow-red warning signs that all is not well.”

Altman, for his part, seems to understand why the apocalyptic AI headlines might make him a target for derision, and he can take a joke at his expense. Or so he says. “I get why people have anxiety,” he told CNBC. “If they need to like project that anxiety on someone or have like a little bit of relief and poke fun at me, it doesn’t bother me.”

Tilly Norwood has been billed the first AI "actor" in Hollywood which raises questions about what awards synthetic performers should be nominated for. In an exclusive chat with CNN’s Elizabeth Wagmeister, Tilly Norwood responded to questions about winning an Oscar.

As AI threatens to decimate creative jobs, “Hollywood is really quite threatened by Silicon Valley at an industrial level,” said Street, the film scholar. Films that criticize tech founders are “almost like a warning to us, but also it’s a way of them reasserting Hollywood’s importance in our culture.”

If studios are wary on the one hand of angering tech leaders with unflattering portrayals, on the other they’re clearly anticipating audience interest in stories about some of the most powerful men of our time.

Part of that could be a way for everyday people to channel “the anger and disillusionment and alienation” at the tech behemoths that seem omnipotent — and particularly at the rapid proliferation of AI, Drummond said.

“Wouldn’t it be nice on a Friday night to go see a movie that allows you to sort of channel some of that fury towards Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, or Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman?” she said. “You want to feel some sense of validation that your anger is well-placed, and I think these movies are going to provide that kind of outlet for audiences.”

And, after all, Hollywood loves a villain.

“Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman and Elon Musk, for very good reason, make for very good villains in film,” Drummond said.

山姆·奥特曼认为即将上映的关于他的电影看起来很糟糕。

“我确实看过电影预告片，”OpenAI创始人最近在接受CNBC采访时谈到即将于今年圣诞节上映的《人工智能》时说道。“我的意思是，它看起来像是一部很糟糕的电影，但我很欣赏人们的创造力，我真心支持这种创造力。”

由卢卡·瓜达尼诺执导，安德鲁·加菲尔德饰演奥特曼的传记片，只是今年众多聚焦于少数特立独行的科技创始人的影片之一，这些创始人正日益主导着公众和私人生活。未来几周，观众还将欣赏到杰瑞米·斯特朗在《社交清算》（The Social Reckoning）中饰演的笨拙而专横的马克·扎克伯格，这部影片是艾伦·索金备受期待的《社交网络》续集；此外，还有亚历克斯·吉布尼执导的长达4小时的纪录片《马斯克》（Musk），讲述了这位世界首富的传奇人生。接下来，Netflix还将推出一部名为《利他主义者》（The Altruists）的剧集，讲述被监禁的加密货币创始人萨姆·班克曼-弗里德的陨落；以及内森·菲尔德和兰斯·奥本海姆执导的神秘纪录片，讲述声名狼藉的Theranos创始人伊丽莎白·霍姆斯的故事。这真是一场科技电影的盛宴。

科技创始人曾是我们的救世主，我们被告知，这些天才将引领我们进入一个连接和生产力的新时代。如今，随着科技行业本身面临反思，至少在公众舆论中，他们的光芒已然黯淡。随着人工智能每天都在引发令人担忧的新闻，根据CNN最近的一项民意调查，绝大多数美国人现在对人工智能和数据中心感到担忧而非兴奋。

《连线》杂志主编凯蒂·德拉蒙德表示，科技兄弟电影的流行反映了“许多美国人的合理不满，他们眼睁睁地看着这些精英，这些生活在泡沫中的人，比上帝还富有，比他们自己还要富有，将他们不想要的技术强加给他们”。

“人们正在寻找表达这种情绪的途径，但这样的途径并不多，”她说。

《社交网络》是科技兄弟电影的奠基之作，也是这一类型的起源。索尔金执导的这部2010年奥斯卡最佳影片提名作品，讲述了扎克伯格从哈佛大学青涩的求学岁月开始，创办了后来发展成为Facebook的网站——最初只是一个给女同学打分的网站。杰西·艾森伯格饰演的年轻扎克伯格是个混蛋，一个自私自利的野心家，他对女友粗鲁无礼，还背叛了自己的挚友（由加菲尔德饰演，这是他首次以科技兄弟形象示人）。

Columbia/Kobal/Shutterstock

但这位反英雄人物身上也有一种孩子气、鲁莽的劲头，这让他有时显得很讨人喜欢；看他演戏很有趣。（不过，扎克伯格并不喜欢这部电影，他说他觉得这部电影“很伤人”。）

另一方面，斯特朗笔下的扎克伯格则像是2021年左右的形象，那时他已经是亿万富翁十多年，并且面临着一连串丑闻，相比之下，《社交网络》中的背叛都显得小巫见大巫。他塑造的扎克伯格——甚至还留着细小的刘海——僵硬得令人难以忍受，像个令人厌恶的暴君，这种阴暗的刻画展现了科技蜜月期的彻底终结。

德拉蒙德说，公众普遍存在的（但并非普遍存在的）“热情、积极性和信任感已经以目前看来无法弥补的方式遭到侵蚀”。

电影学者乔·斯特里特在其著作《硅谷电影》中指出，好莱坞对科技行业的刻画经历了几个阶段。在2010年代初期的黄金时期——当时扎克伯格虽然在电影《社交网络》中饱受诟病，但也被《时代》杂志评为年度人物——像HBO的《硅谷》这样的剧集将科技创始人描绘成笨拙的书呆子。而2013年的传记电影《乔布斯》则展现了主人公复杂而天才的一面。

但在2010年代后期，一系列主流电影涌现，将科技公司创始人塑造成反派角色，例如《侏罗纪世界》、《毒液》和《终结者：创世纪》。斯特里特将这种原型称为“涡轮资本主义科技兄弟”，他们将利润置于道德和人命之上。与此同时，大型科技公司也开始尝到一些反噬的滋味。2018年爆发的剑桥分析公司丑闻揭露了数百万Facebook用户的个人数据如何在未经用户同意的情况下被使用，引发了广泛的审查。

Leah Gallo/索尼影视娱乐

最近，艾德·诺顿在《玻璃洋葱：利刃出鞘之谜》中饰演了一位类似马斯克的亿万富翁，而塔伊加·维迪提则在《失控玩家》中饰演了一位自恋、诈骗成性的CEO。

斯特里特认为，这些电影的共同之处在于，反派最终都得到了应有的惩罚（比如伊尔凡·可汗在《侏罗纪世界》中饰演的那个横行霸道的科技公司创始人最终成了恐龙的食物）。“这其中似乎包含着某种愿望的实现，”他说道。在这些电影中，虚构的创始人“归根结底都是愚蠢的人类——大自然终将让他们走向毁灭。”

现在，2026年的科技兄弟电影来了——它们与以往截然不同。这些电影不再以虚构故事讽刺科技创始人，而是聚焦于真实人物的生活，这些人非但没有受到应有的惩罚，反而比以往任何时候都更加强大。

创始人并不喜欢这种对他们生活造成冲击的媒体狂潮。

马斯克称这部关于他的纪录片是一部“攻击性作品”，缺乏诚信（他与吉布尼之间的 X 战争以及拒绝接受采访构成了这部电影的情节的一部分）。

扎克伯格尚未对《社交清算》发表评论，但他仍然坚持认为《社交网络》完全误解了他的动机（但至少误解了他的时尚选择）。

随着科技行业对经济的渗透越来越深，甚至波及娱乐业，拍摄以科技巨头为主题的电影似乎变得越来越棘手。以《人工智能》为例：这部电影最初计划由亚马逊旗下的电影电视部门亚马逊米高梅影业发行。但亚马逊在6月份放弃了这部电影，称“如果由其他工作室发行，效果会更好”。而就在几个月前，亚马逊刚刚与OpenAI签署了一项规模庞大的合作协议。亚马逊没有回应关于放弃《人工智能》发行和与OpenAI合作是否相关的提问。

《人工智能》最终被规模小得多的发行商NEON接手，并定于圣诞节在影院上映。NEON和OpenAI均未回应置评请求。

德拉蒙德表示，她觉得《人工》的复兴“令人鼓舞”，但“就像闪烁的黄色或黄红色警告标志一样，表明情况并不乐观”。

奥特曼本人似乎明白，那些关于人工智能末日论调的新闻标题为何会让他成为嘲讽的对象，而且他也能接受别人拿他开玩笑。至少他是这么说的。“我理解人们为什么会焦虑，”他告诉CNBC，“如果他们需要把这种焦虑投射到别人身上，或者想借此发泄一下，拿我开个玩笑，我不会介意的。”

蒂莉·诺伍德被誉为好莱坞首位人工智能“演员”，这引发了人们对合成演员应获得哪些奖项提名的讨论。在与CNN记者伊丽莎白·瓦格迈斯特的独家访谈中，蒂莉·诺伍德回应了有关赢得奥斯卡奖的问题。

随着人工智能威胁到创意工作岗位的锐减，“好莱坞在产业层面上确实受到了硅谷的严重威胁，”电影学者斯特里特说道。批评科技公司创始人的电影“几乎就像是对我们的一种警告，但同时也是他们重申好莱坞在我们文化中重要性的一种方式。”

一方面，电影公司担心用不讨喜的刻画激怒科技界领袖；另一方面，他们显然预料到观众会对讲述我们这个时代一些最有权势的人的故事感兴趣。

德拉蒙德表示，这或许是普通人发泄对那些看似无所不能的科技巨头的“愤怒、失望和疏离感”的一种方式，尤其是对人工智能快速普及的这种感觉。

“周五晚上去看部电影，让你能把对杰瑞米·斯特朗饰演的马克·扎克伯格，或者安德鲁·加菲尔德饰演的萨姆·奥特曼的愤怒发泄出来，那该多好啊？”她说道。“你想得到某种认同感，证明你的愤怒是有道理的，我认为这些电影能为观众提供这种宣泄的途径。”

毕竟，好莱坞最爱反派角色。

德拉蒙德说：“马克·扎克伯格、萨姆·奥特曼和埃隆·马斯克，出于种种原因，都是电影中非常好的反派角色。”