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mygif

It also doesn’t help that fundamentally Steve Jobs was well basically a giant asshole. Inasmuch as nerd culture seems to revel in its antisocial tendencies. Most people simply don’t want to watch that for a couple of hours.

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mygif

Just a quick note on Movie profitability – a rough rule of thumb is that a film needs to make (roughly) 3-4 times it’s budget in box office receipts before it makes a dollar of profit. Every film is a little different, but a good rule of thumb is that theatres keep about half of each ticket, and distributors get to recoup a “prints and advertising” budget that can be 50%-100% of the budget of the film itself for a “wide” release. There’s still a lot of leeway, but that will put you in the ballpark.

So if “Steve Jobs” budget was $30M, it would likely have to take in $60M-$120M before the budget is recouped.

Obviously there’s tonnes of different revenue streams (VOD, Television, iTunes…) that will factor into the final analysis, but there’s a lot of people assuming if the Box Office Mojo total for a film is greater than it’s budget the film made money, which isn’t true at all (and fetishizing BO totals to attract uninformed investors is something the industry has done since the dawn of cinema).

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Cespinarve said on October 30th, 2015 at 1:34 am

Movie take is front-loaded though – studios get far more of the ticket price in the first two weeks, generally, then they do after. While the average cut is half-to-the-theatre, that may only be true for six weeks out of an eight week run – and most films make the majority of their cash in those first two weeks.

Or so I have been given to understand.

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EnlightBystand said on October 30th, 2015 at 5:00 pm

Yay! MGK’s back!

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Steve from the internets said on October 31st, 2015 at 7:31 pm

I agree. A film about someone I don’t particularly care about with a much better actor in the lead role than the previous version is still a film about someone I don’t particularly care about.

I mean, I could go see Vin Diesel having fun waving a flaming sword about in a cheesy B movie. Why would I watch Jobs?

(hooray, MGK is back! Yes, John Seavey, you are good too)

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mygif

Of course he can’t melt steel beams, he has to use his magnetic powers on them.

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mygif

@Steve from the internets: Does that mean that they should cast Vin Diesel as Steve Jobs and include more lightsaber duels with Bill Gates in his movie?

Never mind. The answer is so obviously “yes” that I shouldn’t even ask the question.

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Tim McGaha said on November 1st, 2015 at 10:39 am

On a recent movie night, our choices came down to the new Steve Jobs movie, “Bridge of Spies”, and “The Martian”. When my wife suggested the Steve Jobs movie, I said something like, “No. He’s kind of a dick.”

Contrast this with another movie about a guy who’s also kind of a dick: “Wolf of Wall Street”. But, at least metaphorically speaking, Leo’s character gets the crap kicked out of him. Bad things happening to bad people is fine sport, and “Wolf” did very well at the box office.

(We picked “The Martian”, by the way. Extremely good.)

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Tim O'Neil said on November 1st, 2015 at 10:40 pm

I wrote a scathing review of a Jobs biography – marketed as a childrens’ book, no less – a couple months ago. I expected a lot of blowback in the comments from people upset that I would say bad things about Jobs. To my surprise, the comments were pretty much unanimous in agreeing that Jobs was an overrated jerk-off.

There’s a lot of people – even people who generally like Mac products, such as myself – who have come around to understanding that the guy was a human toxic waste dump, despite what other rich guys have to say in the matter. I’d rather stick my hand in a blender than willingly spend two hours in a dark room with the guy.

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Admiral Snackbar said on November 2nd, 2015 at 2:31 pm

Ah, the rich white guy market. That’s why we get so many lovely variations on Sorkin’s ubermensch fantasies.

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mygif

I’ve lately begun to wonder if there ever actually was a Cult of Jobs, or if there was just an Apple cult (and that was indisputably real) that people thought worshipped the ground Jobs walked on.

Because I’ve never actually seen any of these people who supposedly worshiped the ground Steve Jobs walked on. I’ve seen plenty media-produced parodies of those people. I’ve seen them written about. And I’ve met more than my fair share of people who were in awe of his design and marketing abilities. But the supposed people who worshiped the guy? Never met’em.

Also too: Apple’s market share rendered as percentage of smartphones sold is misleading. Their share of total profits made on the sale of smartphones is… impressive. I think Samsung has to sell two or three Galaxies to make the money Apple makes on a single iPhone.

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Steve from the internets said on November 2nd, 2015 at 6:36 pm

@John Seavey: You may not need to ask the question, but my answer would be “Who wants my kickstarter money RIGHT NOW?”

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mygif

As someone who’s written time and time again about diversity and representation, or more accurately its lack thereof, in Hollywood I’ve actually spent very little of it thinking about the sorts of films that are produced as a result. This may not be particularly original analysis but it’s new, and frankly a little mindblowing [that I haven’t considered it], to me.

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thecuntinator said on November 8th, 2015 at 8:32 am

I doubt that the lack of “diversity” is to blame for the lack of success for a film like this, rather its a tired formulaic approach to film making in which platitudes about genius and the highlighting of family problems are employed so we can ignore more troubling or uneasy truths about someone like Jobs and the world in which he operated. MGK is employing his own platitudes about “rich white men” and markets to achieve the same effect essentially.

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mygif

I put it down to the fact that most people know almost everything there is to know about the guy.

Not only the aforementioned books and movies, but the whole IBM vs Mac saga is a fairly well known story, and his accomplishments and personality is in other things like Pixars Creativity Inc.

It’s just a case that there is not a lot left to say about the guy, and as other comments mention, particularly someone who doesn’t seem to have been a very likeable person and isn’t really accomplished as he has been made out to be (still arguably a very important person in the computing industry no doubt)

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