Coming to a theater near you - Blackberry: The Motion Picture

"BlackBerry" is about to become a big-screen feature film, a movie charting the rise and fall of the company's co-founders as well as that of the phones.

Back at the iPhone launch, Steve Jobs mocked keyboards for taking up so much room on phones like the BlackBerry, and he did have a point. As the keyboards took up so much space, BlackBerry did tend to have very small screens.

But where Apple went for removing the keyboard in favor of touch, BlackBerry has now gone for putting that small screen onto a vastly bigger one. BlackBerry phones are to star in their own feature film.

That sounds as if Pixar were about to animate the adventures of these once-ubiquitous phones and that might have been fun. It might also have been likely to feature a rather happier ending than the real movie will.

For according to Variety, this new film is the story of what went so very right, and then went so very wrong. "BlackBerry" charts the astounding rise of the phones, and also the spectacular fall once it had competition from the iPhone.

It's a tale that has been very well told in the book, "Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry." That 2015 non-fiction book by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff reads as compellingly as a novel, and specifically because of the people it introduces us to.

The book has now been adapted into a screenplay that keeps this same focus. It's less about the wincingly disastrous models of BlackBerry that failed to topple the iPhone, and more about the founders of the company.

Real-life co-founders Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie are believed to be being played by by Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton, though it's not known who has which role. The movie follows how they founded what was originally called Research in Motion, and how their relationship changed.

Famously, Lazaridis saw right away that Apple was a problem, saying "these guys are really, really good." But Balsillie said of the iPhone launch: "It's OK — we'll be fine."

The film is in post-production and will be shown to distributors at the Toronto International Film Festival. It already has a deal to be distributed in Canada.

It's not known when the film will get a wider distribution, but production of the movie comes in a significant year for BlackBerry. For 2022 is effectively the end of the story, as BlackBerry removed the ability for its old phones to even make calls in January.

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7 Comments

lowededwookie 1170 comments · 16 Years

About 2 years ago

For 2022 is effectively the end of the story, as BlackBerry removed the ability for its old phones to even make calls in January.
I’m sorry, what? Blackberry won’t even function as a basic cellphone? That’s mental. Hell, even a phone from 1990 should still be able to make calls. That’s literally the basic functionality of a cellphone.

Seems like a good thing BlackBerry failed.

mikewallace 10 comments · 3 Years

lowededwookie said:

For 2022 is effectively the end of the story, as BlackBerry removed the ability for its old phones to even make calls in January.

I’m sorry, what? Blackberry won’t even function as a basic cellphone? That’s mental. Hell, even a phone from 1990 should still be able to make calls. That’s literally the basic functionality of a cellphone.

Seems like a good thing BlackBerry failed.

That’s the way of cellular radios.

Cell phones aren’t simply just a wireless version of the old style Bell phone, but are now radio signal receivers/transmitters. As such when the carriers drop support for a legacy transmission specification, any phone limited to that spec will no longer work.

Here in the US that is currently happening to all non 4G capable phones. So this isn’t just a decision made by Blackberry to stop supporting their phones.

It seems that just like the concept that batteries don’t last forever, some don’t grok that radio communication standards aren’t permanent (thankfully so) either.

dcgoo 284 comments · 13 Years

lowededwookie said:

For 2022 is effectively the end of the story, as BlackBerry removed the ability for its old phones to even make calls in January.

I’m sorry, what? Blackberry won’t even function as a basic cellphone? That’s mental. Hell, even a phone from 1990 should still be able to make calls. That’s literally the basic functionality of a cellphone.
Not true at all. Old tech phones are no longer working because the cellcos are decommissioning the old 2G and 3G networks. Heck the first few generations of the iPhone also no longer work, for the same reason. The analog phones from the 1990s have been dead for years.

Anilu_777 576 comments · 8 Years

dcgoo said:

lowededwookie said:

For 2022 is effectively the end of the story, as BlackBerry removed the ability for its old phones to even make calls in January.

I’m sorry, what? Blackberry won’t even function as a basic cellphone? That’s mental. Hell, even a phone from 1990 should still be able to make calls. That’s literally the basic functionality of a cellphone.
Not true at all. Old tech phones are no longer working because the cellcos are decommissioning the old 2G and 3G networks. Heck the first few generations of the iPhone also no longer work, for the same reason. The analog phones from the 1990s have been dead for years.

Exactly. In Canada if you can find a 3G network - yes even in big cities I can get them, more so in rural areas, they’ll work fine for calls. But as they have been disconnected from BlackBerry servers for about 6 months, no BlackBerry services will work. Apps are starting to fail as they don’t work any more. BlackBerrys’ Android runtime was 4.1 so apps being supported on that are getting fewer and fewer. (Yes there are Android-powered BlackBerrys that are now on Android 8 so those will still work for longer but will not get any more updates.)

Steveadee 14 comments · 6 Years

As a committed BB user (hey, my playbook is still working well, have the teeny tiny BT keyboard, and with the adapter shows well on an HDTV) I still believe that Balsillie was so distracted by his campaign to bring major league sports to Hamilton that he failed to heed opinions around him, and that the abysmal attempt to regain usability for the everyday user was dead on every launch. I still mourn the passing of BB10, to me a truly intuitive OS. When forced to choose, I opted for iOS as Android just doesn’t do it for me.