You Had Several Jobs

It used to be that if they were going to reboot a movie franchise, they'd wait a few years. Like there was quite a gap between the Tim Burton Batman movie and the Christopher Nolan Batman movies. But now they think nothing of just restarting a franchise immediately. The Eric Bana Hulk movie didn't do well, so they just remade it a few years later. Even with a successful franchise like Spiderman just restarted once the trilogy was done.

And now we're seeing a new attempt at making Peter Pan grown up. And then there's the Steve Jobs franchise. The first movie was only modestly successful, so Hollywood just does what they always do: get a new actor and director, then redo the origin story, but make it a little grittier this time around.

As someone who was put off by the Jobs worship following his death, it's refreshing that this movie (or at least its marketing campaign) is willing to go warts-and-all. Obviously, we don’t yet know how the movie itself treats its subject, but someone at the studio thinks we’re Okay with a less-than-perfect Jobs.

So I wonder if this is a lesson to biographical filmmakers that sometimes it's necessary to wait. For instance, after Princess Diana died, there was some idle speculation about a biopic. That struck me as a really bad idea. Although her story was unique and intriguing enough for a movie treatment, it was much too early. If you think back to that time (if you were around then,) you'd have to agree the wild adoration wouldn't have allowed a balanced view of her life.

I'm still not sure we've had enough time to really look at Steve Jobs with 20/20 hindsight. Although we have a much better perspective now, there's still a great misconception of his part in the modern world. It would be like doing a biopic of Bill Gates in the 90's. Now that his career is mostly in the rear-view mirror, we could probably do well, but then we were still living in the world he built, so we couldn't see it realistically.