Steve Jobs biopic crashes on opening weekend

The first of two movies about the late Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs hit theaters this weekend without any of the buzz or sales enjoyed by the iPods or iPads created by its subject, the Wall Street Journal reported.


The movie opened in seventh place with a paltry estimated weekend gross of $6.7 million despite opening broadly in the U.S. and Canada.

“Jobs” focuses on Apple’s early days as a start-up founded by a brilliant and irascible Mr. Jobs (played by Ashton Kutcher) and the brilliant and gentle Steve Wozniak (played by Josh Gad). Throughout the movie, Mr. Jobs’s up-and-down career at the company is chronicled, as a rotating cast of board directors and executives hire and fire him before he returns the company to superstar status with the launch of the iPod in 2001.

It’s a cinematic arc that Hollywood couldn’t resist – twice. A second movie about Mr. Jobs, to be written by Aaron Sorkin (“The Newsroom,” “The Social Network”) and based on Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography is in the works but doesn’t have a release date or star named yet. The weak opening of “Jobs” shouldn’t jeopardize that Sony Corp.6758.TO +0.61% production, considering it comes with a much stronger creative pedigree than the current release, which was pulled together starting about a year after the Apple CEO died of complications from pancreatic cancer in October 2011.

Critics characterized “Jobs” as lacking any of the attention to detail or stream-lined focus that Mr. Jobs brought to his projects. The movie ends before Mr. Jobs turns Apple into one of the world’s richest companies with a string of successes like iTunes and the iPhone, focusing instead on the decades in which he battled with other executives brought in as adult supervision for the company he founded.

“Jobs” was produced for an estimated $12 million by Five Star Feature Films and picked up for release by Open Road Films, a distribution company owned by theater chains AMC Theaters and Regal Entertainment Group that specializes in low- and mid-budget productions. A substantial marketing push was deployed to try and get technophiles to queue up for the movie as though it were a new Apple gadget.

One of the film’s trailers premiered on Instagram, and Mr. Kutcher even appeared trying to channel the intellectually unapologetic Mr. Jobs in public, giving a speech at the Teen Choice Awards last weekend in which he said “the sexiest thing in the entire world” is being smart.

The speech earned better reviews than the movie did. Critics gave “Jobs” a Rotten Tomatoes score of 25% while audiences gave it 53%.