Hopes that an Oscar win or two might revive interest in the Sorkin/Boyle movie Steve Jobs were dashed last night when neither of the nominees won. Michael Fassbender had been nominated for lead actor in the title role, but lost out to Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant. Ironically, DiCaprio was originally on board for the role later taken by Fassbender …
Despite a strong weekend opening, the Sorkin/Boyle movie Steve Jobs appears to have bombed in its nationwide rollout, grossing just $7.3M against earlier estimates of $19M. That gives it a total take so far of around $10M, which Variety says leaves it unlikely to turn a profit.
The picture cost $30 million to make and at least as much to market. That means that “Steve Jobs” needs to do at least $120 million in order to break even. Given that the film is dialogue-driven and lacks a major star, its foreign prospects seem bleak.
The piece notes that the earlier success of Sorkin’s The Social Network may have created false hopes …
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Writing in his column in The Verge, Walt Mossberg – who says he spent “scores of hours” in conversation with Steve Jobs across 14 years – says that the man depicted in the Sorkin/Boyle movie is not the Steve Jobs he knew.
Steve Jobs wasn’t perfect. He was difficult. He was unnecessarily rude and brusque at times. He lied. But he also mellowed and grew as a person, and that mellowing coincided with the best part of his career. Mr. Sorkin opts to hide all of that from his audience. The best of the real Steve Jobs begins to unfold just as Steve Jobs ends.
A lengthy piece in Hollywood Reporter earlier this month – leaning heavily on emails leaked from the Sony hack – provides a lot of insight into what was going on behind the scenes in the run up to the making of the movie. This included the fact that Amy Pascal, co-chairman of Sony Pictures, knew from the start that the project was going to be challenging …
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The Sorkin/Boyle Steve Jobs movie has grossed $2.26M to date, reports Deadline, as it rolled out to a further 56 theaters over the weekend. The movie had earlier achieved the highest average earnings per theater of any movie this year on its opening weekend.
The limited rollout to a total of just 60 theaters meant it didn’t earn enough to make the top 10, headed by Goosebumps – which was on show at 3,500 locations.
While the movie has been criticized by some for the artistic liberties taken with the truth, with even Steve Wozniak and key system software designer Andy Hertzfeld saying that almost nothing shown really happened like that, scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin defended the movie at a London press conference …
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Interviewed by Bloomberg, Steve Wozniak reiterated his comments about the difference between fact and fiction in the Steve Jobs movie, saying that almost nothing shown actually happened, but that it was about personalities, not facts.
It’s a great movie. If Steve Jobs had been making movies, this is the quality it would have had.
Asked about the accusation made by Tim Cook and other Apple execs that movies about Jobs were opportunistic and didn’t accurately portray the man, Woz said that the movie showed Jobs at an earlier time in his life …
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Steve Jobs, the controversial Sorkin/Boyle not-quite biopic, achieved the highest opening weekend Per-Theater Average (PTA) of any movie this year, reports Deadline. The movie also gave director Danny Boyle the best ever weekend average of his career.
The feature grossed sizzling $520,942, averaging $130,236. By comparison, Boyle’s Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire (2008) grossed over $360K in 10 theaters its debut weekend, averaging $36K. The drama about the Apple founder, adapted by Aaron Sorkin, easily outpaced Sicario‘s $67K debut PTA.
It’s not an all-time record, though …
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Interviewed on Conan, Steve Jobs screenplay writer Aaron Sorkin said that he understood why Tim Cook had described movies about Jobs as “opportunistic.” Sorkin had previously responded angrily, then later apologized.
Tim Cook and Steve Jobs were very close friends, and I absolutely understand the man protecting the memory and the legacy of his friend.
He did, however, make a slight dig at criticizing movies without seeing them …
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Former Apple CEO John Sculley has told the WSJ that the Sorkin/Boyle movie Steve Jobs is “extraordinary entertainment” but depicts only one side of Jobs’ personality.
It’s extraordinary entertainment, [but] was really taking one aspect of Steve Jobs’s personality.
Part of his personality was he was a passionate perfectionist, but there were so many other parts […] The young Steve Jobs that I knew had a great sense of humor. He was on many occasions, when we were together, very warm. He cared a lot about the people he worked with and he was a good person. So, I think those aren’t the aspects that are focused on in this movie …
The WSJ reports that Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs repeatedly tried to block production of the Sorkins/Boyle movie Steve Jobs.
Ms. Jobs repeatedly tried to kill the film, according to people familiar with the conversations. She lobbied, among others, Sony Pictures Entertainment, which developed the script but passed on the movie for financial reasons, and Universal Pictures, which is releasing the $33.5 million production on Friday …
Andy Hertzfeld (R) with the actor who plays him, Michael Stuhlbarg (L)
Andy Hertzfeld, one of the key designers of the original Macintosh system software, has told Re/code that the Sorkins/Boyle movie Steve Jobs “deviates from reality everywhere” but “exposes deeper truths” about the man.
It deviates from reality everywhere — almost nothing in it is like it really happened — but ultimately that doesn’t matter that much. The purpose of the film is to entertain, inspire and move the audience, not to portray reality. It is cavalier about the facts but aspires to explore and expose the deeper truths behind Steve’s unusual personality and behavior, and it often but not always succeeds at that.
Hertzfeld said that Sorkin had convinced him that an impressionistic approach was valid …
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Aaron Sorkin, screenwriter of Steve Jobs, told Wired that he had no idea how he was going to turn the huge biography into a movie, and when he finally did come up with an idea for it, he didn’t think the studio would agree.
I didn’t know that much about Steve Jobs, and the idea of doing a biopic was daunting. I work very slowly, and the first couple of months are spent just pacing around, climbing the walls […]
[Finally,] I got this idea, and I wrote an email to Scott saying, “If I had no one to answer to, I would write this entire movie in three real-time scenes, and each one would take place backstage before a particular product launch” […]
Really, I was emailing Scott to get help: Take this thing that I really want to do and tell me what I’m allowed to do, because no studio is going to let me do this. Two or three minutes later, I got an email from Amy Pascal—Scott had forwarded my email to her—and she said, “I think this is a great idea.” I couldn’t believe it. They were going to let me do this thing.
After Steve Wozniak gave a thumbs-up to the upcoming Sorkin/Boyle biopic simply entitled Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder expanded on his comments in a lengthy interview with the BBC’s tech editor Leo Kelion.
Wozniak said that while the film didn’t always portray events in the way they really happened, it did capture the essence of its subject.
But when you see it portrayed dramatically, not the way it really happened but in a way that is emotionally graphic, it really conveys what Steve Jobs was really like inside… and what it was like to be around him.
Wozniak doesn’t, however, pull any punches when talking about Jobs’ personality …
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Steve Jobs, the Universal Pictures biopic written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Danny Boyle, gets its debut screening tomorrow at the Telluride Film Festival. This is followed by a screening at the New York Film Festival on Oct 3rd, before its national release on 9th October.
We first saw a trailer for the movie back in May, with a longer one shown in July and a modified version shown on TV last month. A leaked screenplay draft confirmed that the movie is set around three product launches: the original Macintosh, the NeXT Cube and the iMac …
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Universal Pictures has announced that principal filming of the Steve Jobs biopic written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Danny Boyle is now finally underway. The announcement confirms that the movie, dropped by Sony back in November, will still follow the original three-act structure based around three keynote presentations.
Universal Pictures today announced that principal photography has commenced in San Francisco on Steve Jobs. Set backstage at three iconic product launches and ending in 1998 with the unveiling of the iMac, the film takes us behind the scenes of the digital revolution to paint an intimate portrait of the brilliant man at its epicenter.
Surprisingly, Universal says that the final product announcement will be the iMac, in 1998, rather than the launch of the iPhone as had been widely expected …
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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dg_2UJDrTQ]
In an interview with Bloomberg confirming that Oscar-winning actor Christian Bale will play Steve Jobs in the forthcoming biopic, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin said that there wasn’t even a need for an audition …
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Open Road Films has posted a new JOBS ‘featurette’ which provides an extended look at the film coupled with commentary from Ashton Kutcher, Michael Stern (Director) and other supporting cast members. Check out Ashton’s in-depth interview with The Verge’s Joshua Topolsky for even more insight into his thoughts regarding the film and the general tech landscape. JOBS is slated to be released nationwide on August 16th, but posters for the movie are already popping up at theaters.
https://twitter.com/iDannyOcean/status/356863921975611392
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH1jKZwcS9Y?rel=0]
Ahead of its August 16th opening, the creators of the “Jobs” biopic starring Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs have released the first official trailer (via MR). The trailer gives a peak at the film, demonstrating that the movie will cover early Apple with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to Steve Jobs’s departure to Steve Jobs’s return in the 1990s. Earlier this year, the film premiered to a small audience which gave the movie mixed reviews. Following this, the film was delayed from its original April opening date. Below is another clip from the film (from January):
