Monday Morning Quarterback Part III

By BOP Staff

August 22, 2013

Unbeatable.

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Kim Hollis: Jobs, the biopic starring Ashton Kutcher because why not, earned $6.7 million this weekend. What do you think about this result?

Jason Barney: Not much. I am at a loss as to why this project was even made. Maybe it’s because I am not really a tech guy, maybe I tend not to see movies about this sort of thing. This opening doesn’t surprise me and I consider this a fairly insignificant project. In the long run it will match its production budget, so it deserves credit there, but I doubt many people are going to see this. It will be out of the top ten next weekend.

Brett Ballard-Beach: This had "network TV movie of the week" (as opposed to Prestige Cable TV movie of the week) written all over it. I am not a Kutcher fan, but I at least give him dramatic chops props for being willing to stretch as an actor (and I am also an admirer of The Butterfly Effect.) The budget was only $10 million so this can't be counted as a dire loss. Still, who wouldn't want to hold out for the Aaron Sorkin scripted version that is set to begin production soon?




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Max Braden: When I saw the first trailer for Jobs, I thought, "didn't they make this movie already?" They did, kind of: I was remembering the 1999 made-for-TV (TNT) movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, which starred Noah Wyle as Jobs and Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates and Joey Slotnick as Steve Wozniak. It's interesting to me now that that movie was made years before the iPhone (which only debuted six years ago? feels like forever ago!) and even well before the introduction of the iPod, which helped re-energize Apple. As Brett and others have commented, this just looks like Part 2 of the made-for-TV life of Jobs. That's surprising given his impact on the world. Maybe people outside the tech industry just care more about the products than the man. Oh, also, reviews of the movie were lousy. That's quite a difference from the welcome The Social Network had a few years ago (earning $22.4 million its opening weekend).

Edwin Davies: I think that the idea of "Ashton Kutcher is Steve Jobs" failed the laugh test for most people. Fair play to him for trying to do something different, but unless the film was getting amazing buzz, which it definitely wasn't, there was little chance that people would take a chance on Jobs, especially since everything about it made it seem like a made-for-TV movie that accidentally got sent out to theaters. The trailers were especially uninspiring, since they seemed to center solely on the fact that Ashton Kutcher kind of looks like Steve Jobs, rather than selling what the actual conflict in the story was meant to be.

Kim Hollis: Jobs really did seem to be the movie no one was asking for. I think the story could be interesting, but the moment they cast Ashton Kutcher, all credibility went out the window. Since it's a biopic, Jobs really was going to have to rely on reviews to get people to see it in theaters. When they didn't fall into place, it was pretty much doomed.


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