In 1381, thousands of outraged laborers, farmers, and common folk from across the English countryside marched to London to protest the extreme new taxes placed on the lower classes to fund overseas wars. They besieged the city, breached the Tower of London, and killed several royal officials before the rebellion was quelled by fourteen-year-old King Richard II.
The event, which came to be known as the Peasants’ Revolt, grew out of the social and economic upheaval wrought by the Black Plague. Although it ended in crushing defeat, the event is widely taught to British schoolchildren and has inspired other mass movements over the centuries.
It is also the subject of The Uprising, a film opening Thursday starring Andrew Garfield as a 14th-century everyman who leads a spontaneous rebellion against the out-of-touch ruling class of medieval England. It was written and directed by Paul Greengrass, who specializes in fact-based historical dramas with an urgent, documentary feel (Bloody Sunday, United 93, Captain Phillips).
Though it’s set more than 600 years in the past, The Uprising explores themes that are decidedly of the moment: wealth inequality, populist anger, government corruption, and declining faith in institutions. Greengrass was inspired to write the film during the COVID pandemic, feeling that the story of the Peasants’ Revolt would resonate with contemporary audiences. “Thousands of ordinary men and women set out for London to tear down a world they believed was rigged against them, in favour of the rich and powerful,” he wrote in the film’s production notes. “Sitting down to write the film, that didn’t feel like distant history to me. More like our possible tomorrow!”
The Uprising is one of many films coming this year that will channel rage at the ruling class — from aristocrats draped in ermine cloaks to chainsaw-wielding tech oligarchs and ruthless media tycoons.
Early September marks the unofficial launch of awards season, with film festivals in Telluride, Toronto, and Venice that set the tone for the months of Oscar-wrangling ahead. The mood this year seems decidedly critical of the billionaires who increasingly dominate our political and cultural lives.
Two of these projects premiered early this week, sparking enormous online chatter.
Musk, a nearly four-hour portrait of the SpaceX CEO and MAGA crusader, premiered Tuesday in Venice, where it received a lengthy standing ovation. Directed by Alex Gibney, one of the most acclaimed documentarians in the business, the film attempts to understand how Musk was able to acquire such a fortune or wield such extraordinary influence. It features interviews with numerous people who were once close to Musk, including his father Errol Musk, his first wife Justine Musk, and Ashley St. Clair, the mother of his 13th child (who said she declined to sign a $40 million NDA last year).
Gibney isn’t afraid to challenge powerful, litigious organizations (like the Church of Scientology). It remains to be seen if Musk can do any permanent damage to the recently-minted trillionaire — or, indeed, if anything can. But Musk is already slamming it as worse than dogshit, which is a clear sign that Gibney has probably struck a nerve. It arrives in theaters October 16 — roughly two weeks before Election Day — and will stream on HBO Max early next year.
Also opening on October 16 is You Can See Everything, a wild documentary about another tech entrepreneur with delusions of grandeur: Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.
You Can See Everything premiered in a surprise screening Sunday at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. Directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, the film has a runtime of nearly three hours and was made in secret over three years, beginning just a few weeks before Holmes reported to prison in Texas in March 2023 to begin serving an 11-year sentence on federal fraud charges.
Fielder — creator and star of the exhilaratingly strange docu-comedy The Rehearsal — reportedly even moved in with Holmes, her husband Billy Evans, and their two young children. A trailer that dropped on Monday plays more like a preview for a horror film than a documentary. It shows Holmes and Fielder sharing an intense conversation about her reputation for dishonesty.
“I’m always being real,” Holmes assures Fielder, her eyes wide and unblinking as her newborn coos in the background.
There have been quite a few Holmes-centered projects over the last decade, including Gibney’s documentary, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, and The Dropout, the limited series starring Amanda Seyfried. But You Can See Everything seems likely to shed new light on the disgraced billionaire girlboss who was reportedly plotting to launch a new and improved version of Theranos as she prepared to go to prison.
The Social Reckoning, a quasi-sequel to The Social Network, opens October 9. Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, the film looks at the leak of internal documents in 2021 showing that Facebook executives were well aware of the platform’s damaging effects on young people. This time around, Zuckerberg will be played by Jeremy Strong, because Jesse Eisenberg, who originated the role, apparently no longer wants to be associated with the character. “He doesn’t like kids coming up to him in airports with business cards that say ‘I’m CEO, bitch’ for him to sign,” Sorkin recently said.
If that somehow hasn’t sated your thirst for tales of craven billionaires, on December 11 comes Ink, a drama about Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of The Sun tabloid in 1969 which marked the dawn of a lurid new era in British journalism. Directed by Danny Boyle, of Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire fame, it’s based on the stage play by James Graham, a screenwriter and playwright known for his sharp takes on British history.
And on Christmas Day there’s Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s film about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (played by Andrew Garfield). The movie co-stars Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, was dropped by Amazon shortly after the company signed a $50 billion deal with OpenAI, and was finally picked up by Indie distributor Neon after several other companies passed on the project.
The anti-corporate sentiment has even seeped into summer family fare. In the recently released Coyote vs. Acme, which blends live action and animation, Wile E. Coyote sues Acme for making defective products that have impeded his efforts to catch Road Runner. The film has fared well at the box office and received near-universal acclaim from audiences and critics, but the fact that it even received a theatrical release counts as a small victory against corporate avarice. Under the guidance of CEO David Zaslav, Warner Bros. shelved the project three years ago in order to claim a $30 million tax write-off — a move that star Will Forte said filled him with “white hot anger.” (It was saved by another distributor that will easily recoup its investment.)
Evidently, Forte is not alone in his rage. 2026 may go down as the year when filmmakers finally decided to confront the billionaires who’ve swallowed up their industry and driven it to the brink of extinction.
But will any of these projects lead to change? In this day and age, do movies still have the power to shift public opinion the way that social media algorithms now do? Will anyone who doesn’t already despise Musk, Altman, or Zuckerberg go see these films?
And if they do, will they walk away thinking ‘these guys are rapacious scoundrels’ — or will they admire them as high-flying heroes with lifestyles worth emulating? It may be naive to assume these films — most of which are directed by white male auteurs over the age of fifty — are necessarily critical of their subjects, rather than sympathetic to misunderstood visionaries. Indeed, according to an early reaction from the BBC, Ink portrays Murdoch as “a fearless rebel who takes on the patronising snobs of England’s outdated elite.” Yikes.
Plenty of movies, TV shows, books, and plays feature media moguls and tech titans, but their collective impact has been minimal to non-existent. The Social Network came out 16 years ago, when Mark Zuckerberg was worth a mere $4 billion. He’s now worth more than $200 billion. Rupert Murdoch has weathered numerous devastating exposes and scathing fictionalized portrayals, but at ninety-five-years old, he remains as untouchable and politically influential as ever. (Holmes appears to be the exception, in that her downfall was hastened by a Wall Street Journal investigation.) Even Citizen Kane did nothing to damage William Randolph Hearst while he was still alive (though it wasn’t hailed as a masterpiece until long after he was dead).
This year’s anti-elitist movies may not lead to immediate change. But they do suggest that the entertainment industry, after a period of deafening silence following Trump’s 2024 victory, feels increasingly comfortable indicting the powerful.
As Andrew Garfield said at a recent screening of The Uprising, “I hope there’s some awakening that people feel; that we all feel like our own struggles are being reflected in the struggles of these characters from a distant time and place…And I hope that if any billionaires watch it, they’re scared shitless.”
Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian
YES to The Uprising. Sounds right up my alley. But I will never watch anything about Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, or any of the stunted tech bros--or Melania Trump, for that matter, Mr. Bezos. Thanks, Meredith, for the hints about what to watch and what to avoid!