The BlackBerry Gets Its Own Movie – Watch the Trailer
Director Matt Johnson's new movie, BlackBerry, looks about as entertaining as a movie about obsolete tech can be. It’s a biopic about the rise and fall of the BlackBerry, a mobile phone and digital assistant all rolled into one. Johnson has previously worked on other indie movies, like The Dirties and Operation Avalanche. The movie stars Glenn Howerton (of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia fame) and Jay Baruchel.
BlackBerry started out making handheld pagers, before managing to integrate email capabilities into the devices. At that point, they knew they had something big. Mike Lazaridis, the co-founder of BlackBerry, decided to bring on Jim Balsillie, who would become a co-CEO and the former chair of Research In Motion, the company behind the BlackBerry.
BlackBerries grew in prominence since its inception for years, peaking only in 2012. At that point, the iPhone and Google's Android operating systems ended up overtaking the market. At one point, 56 percent of the whole market was taken up by BlackBerry. The phone also received multiple celebrity endorsements, most famously from Barack Obama.
Watch the trailer for the BlackBerry movie below:
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Unfortunately, behind the scenes, BlackBerry wasn't doing nearly as well as it seemed to be. There were financial issues, technical issues, and even some intellectual property theft. There were 4 major services outages, resulting in huge losses for the company. They also willfully stole a patent from a holding company called NTP, which resulted in over a decade of litigation. The only thing that saved them in the end is that tons of government officials had been using the service, and it became a matter of “national security.”
Here is the film’s official synopsis:
‘BlackBerry’ tells the story of Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, the two men that charted the course of the spectacular rise and catastrophic demise of the world’s first smartphone.
BlackBerry is scheduled to open in theaters on May 12.
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