Director Aaron Sorkin is admitting that he left out President Donald Trump’s name from his upcoming Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot film, The Social Reckoning, even as the film looks like a box office bomb.
Sorkin told Politico that he left Trump’s name out of the film, despite the fact that one of its main topics is all about the riots on Capitol Hill in 2020, along with the subsequent scrutiny Facebook experienced in 2021.
Somewhat absurdly, Sorkin says that he did not want his film to be “too political,” despite the supercharged political themes. Sorkin added that by leaving Trump’s name out of the film, it would be “clean” of being too political.
“I’m not going to deny, of course, that the movie is political,” Sorkin told Politico. “I just think it shouldn’t be. There’s really no reason for it to be. I wasn’t given a directive by the studio. I delivered the script and I think the next day I was in (Sony Pictures chairman) Tom Rothman’s office, and unsolicited, I told him that in that sequence we wouldn’t see any Trump signage at all. We won’t even see red hats. We’re going to see ‘Don’t Tread on Me,’ ‘Stop the Steal.’ You see American flags, Confederate flags, but it won’t be about MAGA versus everybody else, or even red-blue. It’s just going to be about Facebook’s role in the rise of divisiveness, extremism and hyperpartisanship. So, it was my choice.”
He added that Trump would have been a “distraction” for the film.
“I felt like as soon as we got to that scene, as soon as you saw anything ‘Trump,’ it would just become about something else. Again, I realize it’s going to kind of become about that ‘something else’ anyway. But I just like to have clean hands,” he said.
The film follows Facebook’s supposed part in spreading “misinformation” during the 2020 election cycle. It is not known if Sorkin will chronicle that Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has admitted he actually worked hand-in-hand with the Biden administration to shut down conservative content creators and to unconstitutionally violate their freedom of speech.
Sorkin’s film may end up being in vain. The film seems destined for box office bomb status. According to Christian Toto, the film looks like it is set for a low $6 to $10 million opening.
Sorkin’s previous attack on Facebook, The Social Network, carried a $40 million budget. If this follow-up film has a similar production cost, it may struggle to make back its budget.
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