The Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney on Monday announced he was several months into work on “Musk,” which producers promise will offer a “definitive and unvarnished examination” of the tech entrepreneur.Īt the same time as the tech bro’s supervillainy supremacy has emerged, some movies have sought not to lampoon Big Tech but to imbibe some of the digital world’s infinite expanse. “Hollywood refuses to write even one story about an actual company startup where the CEO isn’t a dweeb and/or evil,” Musk tweeted last year. Musk himself hasn’t publicly commented on “Glass Onion,” but he has previously had numerous gripes with Hollywood, including its depictions of guys like him. In a widely read Twitter thread, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro said Johnson was dramatizing Musk as “a bad and stupid man,” which he called “an incredibly stupid theory, since Musk is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in human history.” He added: “How many rockets has Johnson launched lately?” The Tesla and SpaceX chief executive was only one of Johnson’s real-world inspirations, though some took Bron as a direct Musk parody. He’s just skating by with lies, deceit and a bunch of not-real words like “predefinite” and “inbreathiate.”Įven though Johnson wrote “Glass Onion” well before Elon Musk’s shambolic Twitter takeover, the movie’s release seemed almost preternaturally timed to coincide with it. In Johnson’s film, the tech bro/emperor bro truly has no clothes. But Bron is also, as Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc eventually deduces, an idiot. Norton’s eminently punchable CEO, with a name so nearly “Bro,” is enormously rich, powerful and, considering that he’s working on a volatile new energy source, dangerous. “Glass Onion,” nominated for best adapted screenplay, presents a new escalation in tech mogul mockery. I think that’s the same kind of thinking that’s got us into the problem we’re in now, trying to dominate each other and dominate all the life we’re intimately connected to and dependent on.” “He believes that we can dominate our way out of any problem that nature hands us. “In my mind, he’s really the most dangerous human being around,” Rylance says of his Peter Isherwell. They’re villains who see themselves as heroes. Whether their visions of the future pan out or not, we end up living in their world, either way. Tech leaders like Meta chief Zuckerberg have at times been seen favorably by only 1 in 5 Americans.Īs characters, tech bros - hoodie-wearing descendants of the mad scientist - have formed an archetype: Masters of the universe whose hubris leads to catastrophe, social media savants who can’t manage their personal relationships. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 70% of Americans think social media companies do more harm than good. Estimates suggested the film collected some $15 million over opening weekend, the old fashioned way, but Netflix executives have said they don’t plan to make a habit of such theatrical rollouts.Īnd the distrust goes deeper than any Hollywood-Silicon Valley rivalry. Many of the companies that released these movies are disrupters, themselves - none more than Netflix, distributor of “Glass Onion.” The streamer was cajoled into releasing Johnson’s sequel more widely in theaters than any previous Netflix release. Some of these portrayals you could chalk up to Hollywood jealousy over the emergence of another California epicenter of innovation. Recent entries include: Uber’s Travis Kalanick in Showtime’s “Super Pumped” Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu’s “The Dropout” and WeWork’s Adam and Rebekah Neumann in Apple TV’s “We Crashed.” And TV series have just as aggressively rushed to dramatize Big Tech blunders. “Ron’s Gone Wrong” (2021) also used a robot metaphor for smartphone addiction. the Machines,” a newly launched AI brings about a robot apocalypse. Kids movies, too, regularly channel parental anxieties about technology’s impact on children. Superman" Harry Melling’s pharmaceutical entrepreneur in 2020’s “The Old Guard" Taika Waititi’s rule-breaking videogame mogul in 2021’s “Free Guy" Oscar Isaac’s search engine CEO in 2014’s “Ex Machina” and the critical portrait of the Apple co-founder in 2015’s “Steve Jobs.” We’ve had the devious Biosyn Genetics CEO (Campbell Scott) in “Jurassic World: Dominion, a franchise dedicated to the peril of tech overreach Chris Hemsworth’s biotech overlord in “Spiderhead” and Mark Rylance’s maybe-Earth-destroying tech guru in 2021’s “Don’t Look Up.” We’ve had Jesse Eisenberg, who indelibly played Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2010’s “The Social Network,” as a tech bro-styled Lex Luthor in 2016’s “Batman v.
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