Disney president says Jobs would have been ‘appalled’ by Sorkin’s biopic

The real Steve Jobs would have been “appalled” at being the subject of a movie biopic like Steve Jobs, claims Pixar and Walt Disney Animation president Ed Catmull in a new interview.

Check out Catmull’s comments about the unfortunate box office bomb below.

“[The filmmakers] can’t tell the story because the story’s wrong,” Catmull says. “[Steve] went through an arc in his life. There was a time the way he worked with people was not good, and I saw that when I first worked with him. But peo­ple look at that dramatic part, and they’ll make a movie about that — and that’s not the story.

That was the beginning of a more interesting and complex story because when he left Apple, he then entered into what really is the classic hero’s journey: He’s wandering in the wilderness, he’s working with NeXT, it’s not working. He’s working with Pixar, we’re failing. In that process, Steve learned some major lessons, and he changed. He became an empathetic person, and we all saw this when [the Walter Isaacson book] was being written.

Nobody’s going to psychoanalyze Steve while he was alive. That aspect of the change of Steve was missed. That’s the real story.”

Although Catmull (like other critics who knew Jobs, including Jony Ive, Tim Cook etc.) admits to not having seen the movie, the criticism does sum up many other people’s criticism of Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs.

While I, like many reviewers, enjoyed the movie as a piece of entertainment, it fails to tell the most interesting story about Jobs: how a guy whose negative impulses were arguably as damaging as his undoubtedly positive qualities became the older Steve Jobs who turned Apple around in the late 1990s and beyond.

In box office results this weekend, Steve Jobs was removed from a further 200 theaters, with a total weekend box office taking of just $81,900 — compared to $101,025,000 for box office champion The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2.

Source: Hollywood Reporter