Will The Social Network Boost Catfish at the Box Office?

The Social Network and Catfish: Two Facebook Movies Worth Seeing

Ever since The Social Network trailer premiered in July, it’s created a sense of excitement and tension around normally benign and boring things like Facebook, all-girl Belgian choirs, and Jesse Eisenberg. I got a chance to see the film recently via a promo screening, and I can safely say that it lives up to the promise of the trailer. It’s big-budget Hollywood filmmaking at its finest, with the talent involved bringing all of their assets with none of their usual tics. Fincher’s directing is taut and dynamic without being showy, Sorkin’s script is snappy without being overwritten, and Eisenberg is suitably awkward and vulnerable without coming off like a Michael Cera understudy. I’d say go see it, but I’m sure the film will do just fine without my help.

But there is another, smaller, film about Facebook coming out that could use all the help it can get, and that’s the documentary Catfish. Wheareas The Social Network tackles Facebook’s origins, Catfish is about its effects. Arguably, that’s much more relevant to the average person. Seeing the drama and deception behind the creation of a website everyone uses is fascinating, to be sure, but it won’t really affect how they feel about using it. Get to the end of Catfish, though, and it’s hard not to rethink your relationship to social networking and the Internet in general. It’s a powerful little flick, and unfortunately, I can’t really tell you why. The tagline is “Don’t let anyone tell you what it is,” and that’s not just clever marketing. Anyone that plans on seeing it shouldn’t read anything about the content or the making of the movie. It will affect your enjoyment of it, trust me.

Take the usual less-than-stellar grosses of documentaries not about penguins and not directed by Michael Moore and combine that with the fact that people have to take it on faith to see the film, I’m a little worried Catfish won’t find an audience. But, as the headline to this post suggests, I do think there could be some residual interest in the topic left over from the much bigger fiction film. The two don’t really compete so much as complement, and I’ve noticed reviewers pairing the two already. Let’s hope consumers’ wallets and minds are open enough this fall to tackle two very different takes on the social networking phenomenon. They’ll happy they did.

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