Trevor Norlander

The sequel to The Social Network has made less money in its entire run, worldwide, than the original made in its first three days. Sony's now yanking it from almost 2,000 theaters. And the reason goes back to a stopwatch. When Aaron Sorkin wrote The Social Network, his script came in at 162 pages. Hollywood figures about a minute of screen time per page, so Sony was looking at a movie close to three hours long about college kids building a website. The studio was nervous about the length before a single scene got shot. So David Fincher came over to Sorkin's house with a stopwatch. He had Sorkin read the entire script out loud, as fast as Sorkin heard the lines in his own head, and timed every scene. The whole thing came in at one hour and fifty-nine minutes. Then he made the actors talk that fast on camera. Remember the opening scene where Jesse Eisenberg gets dumped in a bar? That took 99 takes over two days. It's why everybody in that movie talks like they've had four espressos, and it's a big reason two hours of guys arguing in deposition rooms plays like a thriller. The Oscars tell you who made that work. The movie won three. Sorkin got one for the script, and the other two went to the people who controlled how fast it felt, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for the score and Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall for the editing. None of them worked on the sequel. Fincher wasn't involved and Eisenberg turned down Sony's money. Sorkin ended up directing it himself, and the cinematographer, Jeff Cronenweth, was the only other big name from 2010 who came back. You can feel it in the reviews. Even critics who liked The Social Reckoning said it's buried in Sorkin monologues. It opened to $5.5 million on a reported $30 million budget and dropped 69% the next weekend. Sorkin is still about as good as anyone alive at writing dialogue. On the first movie, Fincher's whole job was deciding how much of it you'd actually have to sit through, and how fast. This time around, nobody was holding the stopwatch.