Many executives would be thrilled that a major feature film about how they founded their company is about to be released. But for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, an upcoming movie called The Social Network might not exactly become part of his updates to friends.
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Scheduled for release in movie theaters on Oct. 1, The Social Network follows the young Zuckerberg — arrogant, socially out of place, and very bright — through the days at Harvard when he started what is now the world’s foremost social-networking giant. As the tagline for the film says, You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.
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‘Arrogant, Confident, Brilliant’
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The movie is directed by David Fincher, who also helmed The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and it was written by Aaron Sorkin, creator of TV’s The West Wing. The role of Zuckerberg is played by Jesse Eisenberg, whose credits include Zombieland, and the film is based on Ben Mezrich’s best-selling book, The Accidental Billionaires.
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Mezrich has told news media that the Zuckerberg character is an antihero who sweats, is arrogant, confident, brilliant. Along the way toward 500 million friends, the Zuckerberg character gets into conflicts with fellow students and the university administration, among others.
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Facebook and Zuckerberg are taking a low-key approach to the impending release. It’s a sign of Facebook’s impact, said company spokesperson Larry Yu, that we’re the subject of a movie — even one that’s fiction. He added that it’s more important for the company to stay focused on what we’re building.
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In an interview last month with Diane Sawyer of ABC-TV, Zuckerberg, now 26, similarly called the movie fiction, and said that the real story is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. He said that a movie about all that hard work would be actually pretty…