Movies like The Social Network

Why it's similar — Joshua Michael Stern's Steve Jobs biopic operates in the same founder-myth register, with Ashton Kutcher walking through roughly the same career arc Eisenberg gives Zuckerberg — the dorm-room garage-stage origin, the early co-founder cast aside, the recursive lawsuit cycle, the closing image of a man whose product has outscaled the human relationships that produced it. The match is structural rather than tonal. Fincher's film is colder than Stern's, but the founder-and-the-co-founder-he-discards shape is the same shape.

Why it's similar — Gus Van Sant's 1997 Boston-area drama is the closest emotional rhyme on this list — a Cambridge-and-Southie geography, a young man whose intellectual horsepower is operating well ahead of his social capacity, a structural use of a therapy or deposition setting to slow the protagonist down enough to be readable. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's screenplay shares with Sorkin's the working assumption that the smartest person in the room is also the loneliest, and that the institutional grown-ups around him are mostly furniture.

Why it's similar — Peter Howitt's 2001 tech-conspiracy thriller is the late-dot-com era's pulpier take on the same anxiety The Social Network would refine a decade later — a young coder pulled into a Silicon Valley campus that turns out to be running on appropriated code from less-protected developers. The match is conceptual: both films are interested in what happens when the founder mythos is examined from the position of the people whose work it absorbed. Howitt plays it as a thriller; Fincher plays it as a deposition.

Why it's similar — John Woo's 2003 Philip K. Dick adaptation shares with The Social Network the central image of a brilliant engineer who has signed away a piece of his memory or his ownership in exchange for the deal that will make him rich, and who spends the rest of the film trying to reconstruct what he signed and why. The tonal rhyme is the corporate-thriller register; the thematic rhyme is the question of what an inventor actually owns once the contracts have been countersigned.

Why it's similar — James Bridges's 1973 Harvard Law drama is the canonical predecessor for The Social Network's Cambridge geography and its argument about institutional grading systems. The match is the campus itself — the river, the houses, the lecture halls, the social architecture of the final clubs — but more pointedly the central question both films pose about whether the institution's metric is the right metric. Hart in 1973 and Zuckerberg in 2010 are both protagonists who have to decide what the Harvard verdict on their performance is actually measuring.