Steve Jobs had his toughest two days at the box office this weekend since the real Jobs launched the poor-selling Power Mac G4 Cube.
The long-awaited Aaron Sorkin biopic turned to not be that eagerly-anticipated after all, since it limped to a disappointing $7.3 million on its first weekend of wide release.
For those keeping track at home, that’s far, far below the $22.4 million debut of Sorkin’s previous The Social Network, and only marginally better than the panned 2013 Jobs movie, starring Ashton Kutcher. Yikes!
According to box office projections, the $30 million movie had been expected to make between $15 and $19 million for its first wide weekend. In an earlier limited release in Los Angeles and New York, designed to generate buzz, the movie raked in $130,250 per screen — which impressively gave it the 15th highest per-theatre figure in history.
So what can we learn from this? Well, for starters, that it’s dangerous to extrapolate large-scale trends from small data sets, which should be a word of caution for everything from movie box office to tiny studies about the future of Apple Music.
Given the negative reactions to the movie from the likes of Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs, Jony Ive, Tim Cook and — most recently — Walt Mossberg, it’s entirely possible that a number of Apple fans simply chose to skip the movie for fear that it was a hatchet job… err, Jobs. Then again, coming after a previous failed biopic, multiple documentaries and two major biographies, maybe the world simply didn’t need another telling of the Steve Jobs story.
Although this weekend’s disaster certainly doesn’t rule Steve Jobs out of the Oscar race, I’d say it definitely does a lot to harm it. Academy Awards are rarely handed out to a movie because it’s a smash hit, but a huge box office failure also damages its chances.
Did you watch the Steve Jobs movie this weekend? If you did/didn’t what were your thoughts, or reasons behind your decision? Leave them below.
Via: WSJ
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
25 responses to “Jobs done? Sorkin’s biopic flops on opening weekend”
A lot of the negative talk about it made me want to avoid it on opening weekend.
Now may the movie rest in piece as well.
The simple truth is, outside the Apple community, no one gives a bleep about Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs is gone and old news. Nobody watched the movie because nobody cares about Steve Jobs anymore. On top of that, he was apparently a very disagreeable person who did a lot of borderline sociopathic things in his life (denying his daughter’s paternity, paying out a couple hundred of dollars a month in child support when he was worth millions, lying to Woz about how much money they were making off the Macs they were selling, and it goes on). Not to mention the fact that his story has been told and retold and mythologized many times by now.
Hopefully the failure of the second(!) Steve Jobs movie in as many years will stop any further biography, hagiography or mythologizing the unfairly blessed and by most accounts petty, vindictive and angry little life of the man who (sort of) came up with the ideas behind my Mac, iPhone and iPad.
Steve Jobs didn’t lie to Wozniak about how much money they made from Macs. It was about how much they were paid by Atari for a game they collaborated on.
My mistake. Still, what an awful thing to do to a friend over such a small amount of money.
Woz didn’t acknowledge this story for many years. I don’t think it is a good idea to read too much into this anecdote. We don’t know a whole lot about what happened at the time. And it wasn’t the pay. It was the bonus – that Jobs probably didn’t receive on the same day.
I don’t know. The more I learn about Steve Jobs, the more I think he had psychological issues.
I agree in that I hope it’ll put all of these films to rest.
Other than that, I disagree with just about everything else you said. He’s far from old news, it’s so not true that nobody cares about him, and the picture you try to paint is unfair and biased.
However, you’re right that any further stories should be laid to rest.
I should have said, outside of Apple’s fan base and people in Silicon Valley, very few people in America (or the rest of the world) care about the guy. He was ruthless, cruel, and symbolic of America’s status quo. Living in Chicagoland as I do, I would bet it would be easy to find many people who couldn’t tell you who Jobs was, and I would also conjecture that that goes for much of middle America.
Also, even though I’ve long been a fan of Apple’s products, I have never thought much of Jobs. His talent was in sales- he was just luckier than most.
To each their own.
I would add anybody interested in business still cares about Steve Jobs.
While I would never categorize Jobs as a ‘great guy’, I think he’s over-vilified. What was unique about him is that he had a vision and very few could see things they way he saw them. Computers were tools to level the playing field and make them accessible to ever-increasing groups of people. His vision was for the first Apple to be accessible by more than just business and engineers. The Macintosh, with the GUI made computers accessible to people who didn’t like command-line. iOS brought mobile to people who people who never considered carrying a computer in their pocket. Apple under Steve Jobs was about how people interfaced with machines. There’s a lot of people who only care about Specs – Jobs only cared about experience (and that, to a degree required specs, but it was more than that). He had a vision and needed help carrying out that vision – at times aggressively.
Jobs wasn’t lucky – he was passionate and driven.
“Jobs wasn’t lucky – he was passionate and driven.”
You may be right, but I’m inclined to disagree.
Jobs could neither code nor assemble components; without Woz (or another tech-savvy hippy) he would never have gotten anywhere. Had he been born just 10 years later he never would have gotten his foot in the door. Perhaps he would have had a successful career in another field.
I, for one, have never bought his hype. His supposed idea for “your whole music library in your pocket” was called an MP3 player. They existed for years before Apple made them, and I’m sure that some guy on staff at Apple suggested they make an MP3 player and Jobs ran with it; he was happy to put his name on patents that he never could have come up with, since he couldn’t code or assemble components himself, so why wouldn’t he claim credit for someone else’s ideas? Likewise for the iPhone; someone on Job’s staff probably came up with the idea to combine an iPod with a smartphone and add a touchscreen, and Jobs was all too happy to take credit.
I guess Jobs never seemed to me to be the innovator Apple claimed him to be. I see him being more like Thomas Edison, who aggressively purchased other people’s patents and employed a team of people (like Nikola Tesla) to come up with/find a way to build Edison’s “inventions”. The innovators are guys like Woz, or Tesla- they’re more concerned with doing the work than getting paid. But for every Woz, there’s a Jobs- a brilliant, shameless self-promoter who wants nothing more than to be the one in the spotlight, getting all the adulation and credit for other people’s ideas. And to get paid.
Jobs could code. He just wasn’t better than most others. He could design simple circuits, but he wouldn’t rise to Woz-Level.
He had a way of bringing people together and making them think about the most important questions. And he knew how to sell it.
The iPod was the only MP3 player worth buying. The click wheel and the small hard drive and Firewire were the most important ingredients. Other MP3 Players just didn’t offer much benefit compared to Discmans. And boy – they sucked!
It has been reported that the technology in the iPhone would have ended up in an early iPad model, but Steve pushed for the iPhone.
Woz hasn’t done anything worthwhile since the Apple ][. And yet he is one of beloved heroes of all the hacker types.
From Business Insider:
“Steve didn’t ever code,” writes Wozniak. “He wasn’t an engineer and he didn’t do any original design, but he was technical enough to alter and change and add to other designs.”
This is a characteristic that we see referenced time and time again in Walter Isaacson’s biography on Jobs. He was perpetually retooling his employees’ work, never shy about having them change it or otherwise improve it based on what he knew would work.
Nonetheless, it’s odd that Jobs himself never learned to do the hands-on work he asked his employees to do. Today’s big tech moguls, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Tumblr’s David Karp, cut their teeth writing their own code.
I’ve read the Isaacson book (as well as many others). But Jobs himself once gave an intro to developing NeXT Software (very basic stuff). And Brent Schlender in “Becoming Steve Jobs” tells that Jobs boasted about being a good programmer (in the first chapter).
It will probably be a smash in China…
I want to watch it some day but I won’t bother going to the cinema to see it. I’ll wait for it to appear on Netflix.
Part of it is due to the trailer which really, really made it seem anti-Jobs. It showed Jobs as some kind of calculating psychopath, like a villain from a Die Hard movie.
Here’s a question to all here: would the movie have been less or more appealing if it had taken a similar perspective of Jobs, but been based during a less documented period of his life? For me, a big problem is just that I know so much about the Macintosh-era Jobs. Had it been about, say, Antennagate, or the lead up to the iPad launch or something, it would have made it more of a “must watch” because we’d feel like we were seeing something new. It seemed weirdly safe to end the movie in 1998.
Biggest issue is the dude looks nothing like Jobs. There is a guy that does NFL humor skits who looked 10x more like jobs for chrissakes. Yes, it’s important, and also, from what I read by people that knew Jobs, most of this is BS. So why would it flop? Gee, a mystery…
Who needs another Steve Jobs movie?!
Ego project in my opinion, stuck on the bio. mom/daughter
issues, the marketing woman and the Woz issues and over-wrote their
characters.
Steve Jobs, the real person, became iconic. People know what he looked like. But the actor in this movie looks nothing like him. The movie didn’t connect because watching the ads for it never reminded anyone of the real Steve Jobs. Without an authentic Steve Jobs, why bother? What’s the draw?
I may watch it once it hits Netflix, but I certainly wouldn’t pay to see it.
Or maybe it’s because, despite Hollywood and Silicon Valley’s fascination with Jobs, the subject matter is just not that interesting. Jobs was one of the most written-about executives of his time. What more is there to say or remark about?
“Jobs done? Sorkin’s biopic flops on opening weekend”
Couldn’t have turned out any other way. It’s nothing but a badly-biased bio. Even the presence of non-American actors—however good they may be—can’t save the movie that didn’t need to be made, of a cherry-picked tale that was poorly told. Those of us who either knew Steve Jobs, or at least knew him better than Sorkin, can see right though that celluloid. Sorry Arron. No accolades this time.
It’s not hard to understand, i’m not going to watch movies in the theater that are not worth watching on the big screen! times are changing, but hollywood isn’t