Steve Jobs opened wide this past weekend, after two weeks of a very small introductory opening run to build up buzz, and grossing just over $7 million over the weekend probably puts it in the “minor flop” category. It didn’t cost a lot to make, comparatively speaking ($30 million) so it will probably end up breaking even at the least. But, despite massive hype and ton of media attention, Steve Jobs is definitely not a hit movie. (Which is not surprising really because a couple years ago they released Jobs, which was an awful movie starring Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs, and that movie made about $16 million. Steve Jobs will end up making a little more than that, but not that much more. Probably because, come on, Ashton Kutcher? But I digress.)
I propose that the reason Steve Jobs did not do well at the box office is because – wait for it – most people do not particularly care about Steve Jobs. Because let’s be honest here: Steve Jobs was not nearly the revolutionary and populist figure that some people think him to be. Apple was for a very long time simply a hipster response to IBM and Microsoft. Sure, via management of his technology company, he popularized mobile computing. That’s fairly important, sure, but is it truly groundbreaking? He didn’t invent smartphones; he just streamlined them and made them a little more accessible. (And not that much more accessible, not really.) Less than a decade after the iPhone was introduced, Apple doesn’t even have half the market share of a market they more or less created. Steve Jobs hasn’t even been dead five years and already Tim Cook is getting at least 75% of the Jobs hype just because he’s keeping Apple profitable.
But most people, on an everyday basis, don’t care about Steve Jobs. Why should they? Whatever direct effect Jobs had in the creation of all those various Apple products (and that’s something that’s quite debateable) is minimized on people’s everyday lives. Most people use their iPhones for texting, Candy Crush and maybe email sometimes. That’s Jobs’ legacy for most people: the guy who let you spend money for Candy Crush powerups.
Now, on the other hand, to the upper class (and the people who worship the idea of upper class), Steve Jobs is really really important. Steve Jobs became a rich guy and then he became a richer guy.1 That’s why there’s a big fancy biography about Steve Jobs which sold almost a million copies worldwide, which is a lot of books.2 But one million books sold worldwide means about $15 million in movie ticket sales if everybody who bought the book also went to see the movie, and you will recall that Jobs made $16 million so maybe we’re starting to get a sense of exactly how big the market for Steve Jobs-related things in fact is. Which is not large.
But if it’s not large, then why is there a Steve Jobs book and an unauthorized Steve Jobs book and two Steve Jobs movies and two more Steve Jobs documentaries and lots of other things with Steve Jobs on them? Because rich people think Steve Jobs is important and that drives what our creative culture is willing to lionize. Hollywood doesn’t need to be convinced that a Hunger Games will make them a billion dollars, because they know what people actually want to see and usually they’ll do their best to satisfy that. But Hollywood is run mostly by rich white guys who like rich white guy things, and Steve Jobs is one of those things, just like fiftysomething leading men pairing off with twentysomething romantic lady interests. Which means that studio heads will push for a Steve Jobs movie even when a Steve Jobs movie already crapped the bed, because the first Steve Jobs movie didn’t do Steve Jobs right, you see, it just needed a better chance.
None of this is particularly original analysis, mind you. But it’s still right.
- Okay, and the tech industry considered him super-important too, but nerds are nerds. [↩]
- Of course, most of the Harry Potter books sold over 50 million copies per title, so that gives you an idea of the size of the Steve Jobs market: one-fiftieth that of the Harry Potter market, at least literarily speaking. The Harry Potter movies made way more than fifty times as much money as the Steve Jobs movies have made. [↩]
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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.
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).
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.
Yay! MGK’s back!
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)
Of course he can’t melt steel beams, he has to use his magnetic powers on them.
@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.
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.)
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.
Ah, the rich white guy market. That’s why we get so many lovely variations on Sorkin’s ubermensch fantasies.
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.
@John Seavey: You may not need to ask the question, but my answer would be “Who wants my kickstarter money RIGHT NOW?”
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.
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.
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)