The last time director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin got together, they created The Social Network, the story of the creation of Facebook based on the book by Ben Mezrich. The talky film about nerds, a website, and a lawsuit wound up grossing $224 million worldwide and earning eight Academy Award nominations. (It won three, including Best Adapted Screenplay for Sorkin.) This was, by most measurements, a wildly successful collaboration.
If it worked once, why not try it again? The Hollywood Reporter says Fincher is in “early talks” to direct Sorkin’s latest tech-related biopic screenplay, this one about Steve Jobs. The project is set up at Sony.
And speaking of trying something again, this would be the second film about the Apple co-founder, after the apparently non-definitive Jobs from 2013, starring Ashton Kutcher in the title role. That film made just $35.9 million worldwide, but Sorkin and Fincher’s movie has Sorkin and Fincher, plus strong source material: the best-selling Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson.
Fincher is currently finishing his adaptation of another best-seller, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Frankly, I don’t care what he and Sorkin do together; I’m just excited for their continued creative partnership. If they wanted to adapt the instruction manual for a vacuum cleaner I’d be elated. (“Dude that sequence where they cleaned a blockage by unplugging the machine and leaving it to cool down for an hour was off the hook!”)