Hot Docs 2026: MySpace Review

This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Hot Docs Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.

Today, social media is ingrained in nearly every aspect of our lives. Influencers, curated online personas, and celebrities interacting directly with fans have become common practice, but that wasn’t always the case. Twenty-three years ago, MySpace introduced the world to social networking and laid the foundation for the digital culture we now take for granted. Yet, despite once dominating the internet, MySpace now feels like a distant memory. Unlike Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and Snapchat, which have remained culturally relevant to varying degrees for over a decade, MySpace burned brightly and disappeared just as quickly. So how did the platform that revolutionized social media fade into obscurity? In MySpace, documentarian Tommy Avallone explores the meteoric rise and rapid downfall of the pioneering social media site through interviews with the people who built it and those who used it to launch their careers.

First and foremost, MySpace is a very entertaining documentary. Avallone captures the excitement surrounding the creation of a platform that tapped directly into the chaotic creativity of early internet culture and fundamentally changed the way people interacted online. While the MySpace founders themselves are not always the most dynamic interview subjects, their stories provide fascinating insight into what it must have felt like to build something that unexpectedly transformed the world. Thankfully, the documentary balances these interviews with a wide range of personalities who experienced the platform from different perspectives. Early internet figures like Tila Tequila and Jeffree Star reflect on how MySpace helped pioneer online fame, while artists such as Dashboard Confessional, The All-American Rejects, Dane Cook, and Lil Jon share entertaining stories about using the platform to build and interact with their fanbases long before social media marketing became standard practice.

As someone who was aware of MySpace but too young to participate in its heyday, the documentary effectively recreates the excitement of the era and explaining why the platform became such a massive cultural force in the 2000s. Presented in a glossy, energetic package, the film maintains a playful tone and sense of humour that makes it consistently engaging. The problem, however, is that the documentary is incredibly surface level and doesn’t even attempt to dig deeper into the larger implications of MySpace’s rise and fall. Many of the harmful trends associated with modern social media can arguably be traced back to MySpace, yet the film avoids engaging with that messier side of its legacy. It briefly touches on how Facebook quickly eclipsed the platform, as well as the disastrous decision to partner with Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, which stripped away much of MySpace’s independent spirit. Still, the documentary feels overly sanitized, and it’s hard to ignore how closely involved the MySpace founders appear to have been in shaping the film’s narrative.

While the film successfully captures the nostalgia and novelty of MySpace, complete with a flashy Y2K aesthetic that taps into this current wave of nostalgia for that era, it only briefly explores the corporate decisions, technological changes, and shifting online culture that ultimately led to the platform’s downfall. As a result, MySpace works better as an entertaining retrospective on a hugely influential yet short-lived internet phenomenon than as a truly definitive examination of its long-term cultural impact.

still courtesy of Hot Docs

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Tristan French