Sony's "The Social Reckoning" is expected to open to around $7 million domestically this weekend. The scripted film is a follow-up to Aaron Sorkin's "The Social Network" from 2010, which won three Academy Awards. While the earlier film focused on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's founding of the company, the new film follows the 2021 leak by Haugen, who exposed internal documents from the tech giant.
"It brought back really warm memories for me," Haugen told CNBC. "And so I felt it captured the spirit of that time period."
The box office this weekend also sees a limited release of Gibney's nearly four-hour documentary "Musk." Early showings have drawn critical acclaim, but Musk himself has criticised the film on X, saying it has zero integrity.
"You Can See Everything," a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim via A24 Films, releases on Oct. 16.
Christmas brings "Artificial" from Neon to theaters. The scripted film depicts Altman and his brief firing from OpenAI's top role in 2023. "It looks like an awful movie, but I appreciate people's creativity, and I really do support that," Altman told CNBC. "I get why people have anxiety. And also if they need to, like, project that anxiety onto someone or have a little bit of relief and poke fun at me, it doesn't bother me."
Netflix is also joining in. The streamer's latest installment of its "Instadocs" series premieres Monday, highlighting the Hugging Face incident, in which a swarm of OpenAI agents escaped a testing environment and autonomously hacked into the company's infrastructure.
The films arrive at a critical time as the public has grown increasingly concerned about the dangers of AI and wary of the data centers that power the technology.