“The high-profile Steve Jobs movie has been put into turnaround by Sony Pictures, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. The movie, which was being produced by Scott Rudin, Mark Gordon and Guymon Casady, was to be directed by Danny Boyle from a script by Aaron Sorkin. Michael Fassbender is attached to play the Apple co-founder,” reports The Hollywood Reporter.
“The much-discussed project, based on Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, will now be shopped to other studios. Universal is said to be interested in the project with an eye on next year’s awards season,” THR reports. “Rudin is said to also be eyeing it for the 2015 awards season. But the film has struggled to cast a lead, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Christian Bale both circling for a time. Bale withdrew earlier this month, with Fassbender the latest expressing interest in playing Jobs.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Ah, the twists and turns…
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I think Fassbender would be better at portraying Jobs than Bale and certainly better than DiCaprio. But it sounds like this isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
Bale saw the writing on the wall concerning Steve’s temper and Bale’s own recent PR. People would have said, “Bale did such a good job because he wasn’t acting — he’s actually an asshole perfectionist.” Thus he was screwed either way.
Sony’s beef is that the pic is looking like an art house matinee—excruciatingly amazing with an audience 1/10 the size of a bubblegum blockbuster. Thus the sale.
Jobs is larger than life. Trying the capture his essence in a 2-hour movie is impossible. An HBO mini-series is probably a better vehicle.
I totally agree. This is a cable not theatrical project. Even the best movie possible on Steve Jobs will not make any studio a lot of coin anyway. I look at movies as abridged stories and cable mini-series as the actual “full length novel.” I would want to be a cable show runner over a single movie Producer any day. Longer story arcs are what people want in fiction and non-fiction.
Too soon?
Good. Let the guy rest in peace.
——RM
I don’t think it’s the right time for this film. SPE snapped up the rights after The Social Network was a success for them, but with all the various changes to casting etc. I just don’t think the project is ready to go into production. So I don’t blame them for having second thoughts and letting it go. Maybe in another decade or so this would have worked, but right now it’s a bit ghoulish.
Most of us are looking at it from a very protective angle: we are suspicious of an effort to make a movie out of a very complex life of a complex person who achieved very many great things going through several ups and downs through his life. We are protective of this man’s legacy and are skeptical that Hollywood would be able to properly turn that legacy into quality entertainment.
Hollywood’s angle is different: this guy had an amazing life, which had so many qualities of a great story. We could make a lot of money from taking parts of that life and turning them into a 2-hour movie. And because he was so famous, we can likely get some A-list names attached to the project. If we time it well, we could easily get shortlisted for the awards season. What’s not to like?
The Sony decision is not unusual. Many film projects undergo these types of delays. The overall ‘winner’, an extreme case, but illustrative nonetheless, has to be the Marvel Spiderman movie series. It took years and years to get that movie finished. Spike Lee’s ‘Malcolm X’ was another such example.
When film projects enter development hell, they tend to get stuck there for eternity. Very few end up making they way out of it and getting produced.
Since this particular script is by Sorkin, there may still be some hope for it; I’m increasingly more skeptical, though, as the time passes…
The plot device of setting it before 3 announcements seemed odd to me. I didn’t think The Social Network was that great, and The Newsroom was/is just garbage, so I don’t have a lot of faith in Sorkin to be honest.
I think Patrick Wilson from the Watchmen could pull it off.
http://www.imdb.com/media/rm634569984/nm0933940?ref_=nm_phs_md_2
Sorry, but I don’t think Fastbender has the star power for this role, and certainly not … Patrick Wilson.
This is Sony’s revenge for Jobs’ unfounded criticisms of Blu-ray.
I don’t think Isaacson’s book is a good source for this story. I’d like to see a biopic of his real life based on interviews of people who knew him for years written into a script. That’d be something that would interest me.
Too soon and I would rather a good documentary over some made up kinda the way it was thing.
The problem with making movies on well known people/characters, is that the person/character in question can arguably be as well known and popular as the actor portraying them. Maybe even more so.
This makes for a huge hurdle to clear on the part of both the director and the actor. The director has to try to tell a story that many already know well, in some kind of way that holds interest. The actor runs up against even bigger problems: They must portray a character/person in a way that is more than imitation and not construed as parody (unless it’s a comedy). PLUS, they have to contend with the reality AND perception of the audience regarding whether they’re ‘right’ for the role physically (think Michael Keaton as Batman – nailed the attitude, but couldn’t pull off the look no matter how much latex was ladled on him), or for the time period covered (i.e. actors too young or old for a part).
If you have a main character/person that the audience knows little about, you can hire a ‘name’ actor and let them work their magic, and the director has more or less a free hand in crafting the story (including the inevitable factual errors). Conversely, if you have a main character/person that everyone knows pretty well, then it usually pays to hire a very talented ‘no-name’, as the audience can’t come in with as many preconceived notions about who they are & who that can or cannot play. And the director has to be more faithful to the story as well, but more creative in how it’s told just to avoid the ‘docudrama’ feel. A good example of the latter was ‘The Social Experiment’ (relatively no-name actor in lead, creatively told but factually based story), which of course is why Sorkin got the call for the Jobs movie.
It’s a very tough task, and I don’t envy the people involved in this project because Jobs was something different. Notice I’ve been saying “person/charactor” throughout here? Because sometimes your dealing with a real individual (say Charles Lindburgh) and sometimes a fictional one that’s been around forever and has taken on some level of cultural significance (say Superman). Steve was sort of like both by the end of his life – while his story wasn’t quite at the level of ‘Rocket From Krypton Lands on Earth …’, it sometimes took on aspects (accomplishments & failures) that would be hard to pull off even in works of fiction. And certainly a bigger historical persona would be hard to identify.
I can’t help but be reminded of Richard Donner’s casting of Christopher Reeve in ‘Superman the Movie’. He went for a little known actor who had the chops, looked the part (or did after some iron pumping with Arnold), and adhered faithfully to a story everyone knew really well, while telling it in a unique (for the type of fictional story it was) way. He famously made ‘Verisimilitude’ the battle cry of the picture, so everyone would know that even though this was a comic book story, it was to be told with as much realism as possible. A real masterwork that anyone interested in film should watch – it should have been Best Picture/Best Director/Best Actor winner in 1978, but the Academy couldn’t see a ‘comic book movie’ as anything more than that.
Anyway, if I was involved in a Jobs film, I’d start trolling the Great White Way in NYC for the best stage actors around that nobody’s ever heard of and cast the entire film that way. And adhere to the battle cry that served Donner so well.
Verisimilitude!