Aaron Sorkin's follow-up to The Social Network arrives in Canadian theatres on October 9, and film fans in Vancouver have an extra reason to buy a ticket: much of The Social Reckoning was shot in their city. The official teaser already shows recognizable backdrops, including the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University, so locals may spot familiar campuses doubling for the world of Big Tech.
The film is a companion piece rather than a sequel. Where The Social Network covered Facebook's dorm-room origins, this one jumps to the platform's reckoning era. It centres on Frances Haugen, the engineer who quietly copied tens of thousands of internal documents before leaving the company and handed them to the press. Anora Oscar winner Mikey Madison plays Haugen, while Jeremy Allen White of The Bear takes the role of Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, who helped turn the leaks into the "Facebook Files" — revelations about Instagram's effects on mental health and how misinformation spread across the platform.
Succession's Jeremy Strong steps in as Mark Zuckerberg, and the story builds towards the congressional testimony that put Facebook's grip on the global public square under the spotlight. Sorkin wrote and directed, giving it the same pedigree as the 2010 original.
For travellers, the Vancouver connection is the hook. The city has become one of North America's busiest filming hubs, and this production adds two major campuses to its screen-tourism map. UBC's concrete brutalist buildings and ocean-fringed Point Grey setting have appeared in countless films and series, while SFU's Burnaby mountain campus — designed by Arthur Erickson — is a favourite stand-in for institutional America. Watching the film and then walking the same quadrangles makes an easy, cheap day out for anyone visiting the city this autumn.
There's also a giveaway running: ten pairs of tickets, split evenly between readers in Toronto and Vancouver, with standard tickets available through Cineplex for everyone else. Whether you go for the tech-industry drama, Sorkin's dialogue or the spotting-the-locations game, October 9 is the date to note.
