BlackBerry was the ‘It’ phone but it all went downhill, as we explore in the BlackBerry trailer breakdown. It is an upcoming biopic which is adapted from Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s book, Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry.
The film is directed by Matt Johnson and the screenplay is co-written by him & Matthew Miller. It is produced by Fraser Ash, Niv Fichman, Kevin Krikst and Matthew Miller. Executive producers are Nate Bolotin, Maxime Cottray, Adrian Love, Jay McCarrol, Noah Segal, Nick Spicer, Aram Tertzakian and Robert Upchurch. It also had a premiere recently at the Berlin film festival.
The ensemble cast of the film includes Jay Baruchel as Mike Lazaridis, Glenn Howerton as Jim Balsillie, Cary Elwes as Carl Yankowski, Saul Rubinek as John Woodman, Michael Ironside as Charles Purdy, Rich Sommer as Paul Stannos, SungWon Cho as Ritchie Cheung, Michelle Giroux as Dara Frankel and Matt Johnson as Douglas Fregin.
The film will show the true story of the meteoric rise & catastrophic demise of the world’s first smartphone. It is described as a whirlwind ride through a ruthlessly competitive Silicon Valley at breakneck speeds, with a runtime of about 2 hours.
BlackBerry Trailer Breakdown
The trailer starts off in the year 1996 when Mike Lazaridis (Baruchel) and Douglas Fregin (Johnson) are trying to convince Jim Balsillie about their idea of a cell phone with an email machine, all in one. While it seems like a basic thing nowadays but everything had a start from somewhere and this is how the idea of BlackBerry come to life.
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Doug explains the mechanism of the phone by saying that there is a free wireless internet signal all across North America and nobody has figured out how to use it, until them. Although, the two engineers think Balsillie is sketchy or a ‘shark’ but when he asks for 50% of the company along with being the CEO, Mike agrees to it. Even though his partner thinks it’s a bad deal.
What started as a Research in Motion Limited transforms into BlackBerry limited when Balsillie rushes them to make a prototype as soon as possible, which can be taken to investors and marketed. We see Mike saying that, “I’ll do it perfectly or I don’t do it”, to which he gets the response that perfect is the enemy of good but he comes back with the last words saying, “good enough is the enemy of humanity.”
Once the prototype finally gets assembled, they take it to the investors and the term BlackBerry comes from Balsillie when asked for the product name. I am not sure if everyone discussed the name or if it came out in the spur of the moment, but the name stuck & became a brand. It also got tagged as crack berries because you could see it in every fortune 500 executive hand & those who didn’t have it, craved it.
However, as we all know, with success comes many sacrifices and in stories like these, the people we start off with often get left behind. AS Mark is forced to leave his partner Doug to continue his successful venture with Balsillie. But when something blows up much more than you could have imagined, many repercussions also arise. Like putting a large number of smartphones on the same network could potentially crash.
Slowly the one who created the smartphone market finds itself dipping down due it’s own shortfall and the emergence of better competitors, with whom they weren’t able to keep up. The rise of BlackBerry was truly revolutionary and those who used it at its helm might even feel nostalgic, watching it. There is also a cameo of SungWon Cho, who you might have come across on social media for his impeccable voice acting and hilarious comedy skits.
Watch BlackBerry Trailer
The film is scheduled to be released on 12th May 2023 in theatres.
Are you looking forward to watching this tech film? Let us know your thoughts on the trailer in the comments below.
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