Spoiler alert: Here’s what you can expect from Steve Jobs movie

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Cult of Mac's mockup of the Steve Jobs movie poster. (The release date has changed since we made it.) Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m excited about upcoming movie Steve Jobs, written by one my favorite writers, Aaron Sorkin.

Early photos suggest lead actor Michael Fassbender doesn’t look that much like Steve Jobs, and I’d be a bit more psyched if David Fincher was directing, but I firmly believe this is the theatrical movie about Jobs that could finally do justice to its main character.

Ahead of the movie’s October 9 release (which should put it squarely between the iPhone 6s release and the next iPad announcement), we have a few more details about the movie that shed some extra light on how we can expect things to play out onscreen.

It sounds like the movie (which takes place in three 30-minute acts, each based around a separate Jobs product launch) will follow the original Mac intro, the unveiling of the NeXT Computer and the launch of the iMac. This structure, first reported by CNET’s resident Apple-watcher Shara Tibken, contrasts with original reports that the movie would end with the launch of the iPod.

The iMac works as a mirror of the original Macintosh, since it stamped Jobs’ vision of computing back on Apple after his decade-long absence from the company, just as the original Mac was the most “Jobsian” machine Apple came out with in its first decade. It does mean, however, that we’ll never get a glimpse of Apple moving beyond computers, as it did with the iPod — or any kind of look at Apple in the 21st century.

Also claimed by Tibken is that the movie’s various flashbacks will take place at the end of each act, alongside transitions featuring short news clips with music from Bob Dylan, Handel’s Messiah and Joni Mitchell. Both Dylan and Mitchell were favorites of Jobs’, as he discussed in the Walter Isaacson biography upon which this movie is based.

Finally, the two main relationships of Jobs’ said to feature in the film are with co-founder Steve Wozniak and with his daughter, Lisa.

Lisa has been described by Sorkin as the movie’s “heroine.” It makes sense to focus on her relationship with her father, since it changed significantly over the time frame of the movie — from Jobs’ initial refusal to acknowledge paternity (despite naming a computer after her) to eventually establishing some kind of connection with her.

The relationship with Wozniak is going to be interesting to see play out. Woz clearly had an enormous impact on Apple early on with his beloved Apple II, but his work on the first Macintosh was very limited. He had nothing to do with NeXT after Jobs left Apple in 1985, and he wasn’t a particularly big fan of the iMac either.

In Woz’s biography, he wrote that, “To be honest, I was never all that crazy for the iMacs. I had my doubts about its one-piece design. I didn’t care about its colors and I just didn’t think its looks were all that good. It turned out I just wasn’t the right customer for it.”

How Sorkin and director Danny Boyle plan to weave all these strands together in a compelling way is something we’ll have to wait to find out. I’m excited to see it, though.

Source: Shara Tibken/Twitter

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