Danny Boyle, director of the unfortunate box office bomb Steve Jobs, has said that people involved with the movie were guilty of behaving in an “arrogant” way.
Why? Not through twisting the truth, or painting an unfairly unflattering portrait of Apple’s late CEO as some have suggested — but rather opening the movie wide as quickly as they did.
“We were arrogant to release it very wide, very quickly,” Boyle said during a fundraising event for Shuffle Festival.
As we’ve written about at Cult of Mac, Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle’s Jobs biopic was dumped from 2,072 screens after its already weak box office takings fell a massive 69 percent soon after opening.
This isn’t the first time Boyle has discussed the release schedule of the film, after it initially opened to good (albeit very limited) takings at select screens in New York and Los Angeles. Interestingly, the last time Boyle talked about the suggestion that the movie went wide too quickly, he lashed out at “hindsight experts” for claiming this.
Personally, I think it’s clear by now that the movie was never going to be a hit with audiences outside of core markets like L.A. and New York. While the theory of limited movie releasing for prestige pictures is to drum up strong reviews and word-of-mouth before expanding, in the case of Steve Jobs the movie got its best reviews early on, and has since suffered a more damaging backlash.
If you haven’t seen Steve Jobs, you can check out a PDF of Aaron Sorkin’s script here, which was released by Universal last week.
Source: Business Insider
