William Gallagher
The rise and especially the calamitous fall of BlackBerry precipitated by Steve Jobs and the iPhone is the subject of a new movie, opening in theaters in May.
Six months after it completed post-production and the search for a distributor ramped up, "BlackBerry" is to be released in theaters on May 12, 2023. Written by Matthew Miller and Matt Johnson, the director, it's based on the 2015 non-fiction book, "Losing the Signal."
Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton star as BlackBerry founders Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. The film is billed as a "whirlwind ride through a ruthlessly competitive Silicon Valley at breakneck speeds."
In the 1990s, Lazaridis and Balsillie created the BlackBerry smartphones that for a time were an astonishing worldwide success. There were mistakes made and clashes within the company, but it was ultimately the iPhone that led to the total destruction of BlackBerry.
If you look closely at the trailer, the footage of Jobs announcing the iPhone is clear. What else is clear, is an iMac G4 on a desk.
By 2022, when the BlackBerry film was first announced, the company finally switched off even the ability for existing users to make calls on their phones.
In the US, the film has been bought for theatrical release by IFC Films, while in Canada it will be distributed by Elevation Pictures. A US streamer has not been confirmed, but the film is expected to be shown worldwide on Paramount+ at some point after its run in theaters.
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10 Comments
Trailer is good. Looking forward to this film. Think my Canadian cousins will hate it tho. (She and her husband literally got their first iPhones this year.)
I bought that book on my iPad when it came out. It’s a great book, with interviews from the CEOs of RIM as well as from other companies, such as Verizon, which was the principle sales terminal for the Blackberry. Once Blackberry made an irretrievable error with their response to the iPhone, with the Storm, Verizon removed their advertising of Blackberry from their network and moved to the otherwise not yet successful Android (remember that campaign? It was towards young men, with aliens, meteoroids, etc). That destroyed Blackberry. They never came back from that.
I love Palm CEO's take:
“We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” Colligan said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.”
From Day 1 Apple has been trying to make the best phone possible, Not a "decent" phone and there's where all the windows/palm/nokia/blackberries went to die.
BlackBerry’s response to the iPhone was the Storm. A heavy beast with a spongy plastic screen and a response rate slower than a 15 year old Labrador.
my cousin, a crackberry head, had one. Even he realised it was the end.