Comment - Thea Sølling Nilsen

As I’m scrolling through the website for my local movie theater, looking through the selection of upcoming movies, I notice the poster for a movie named BlackBerry. “As in the smartphone brand?” I wonder. And it is, indeed, a film about the story behind the now shut-down brand that once ruled the smartphone market. It’s November, and we have officially gotten our fourth movie of the year centered around the history of a big corporation.

Four movies about the story behind famous brands and products, all from this year alone. Photos: Filmweb.no

Hollywood’s newest profitable trend

The movie industry is well-known for seeing one particular type of movie doing really well, only to push out ten more of the same kind. We only have to look back to the incredible success of Bohemian Rhapsody in 2018, and all the biopics about famous musicians that quickly followed. Elton John, David Bowie, Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley - alive or dead, it doesn’t really matter, as long as your name brings the masses to the movie theater. A preexisting fanbase for the artist portrayed usually means guaranteed success for the film studios, making rockstar biopics a safe bet as the recognition value is already high. That is, granted they don’t absolutely butcher the movie, like, for example, the creators of the 2020 David Bowie biopic Stardust did. They didn’t get the rights to use Bowie’s music, as his family didn’t approve of the project, and the acting, costume design, storytelling and more or less every other aspect of it was just really, really bad. But, if you avoid those kinds of mistakes, you should probably be fine.

But Hollywood seems to have moved on to the next big trend. A new subgenre has been on the rise for the past decade, reaching an all-time high this year: the brand biopic. The brand biopic is a distant cousin of the musician biopic: they’re both feature films “based on a true story” following someone’s rise to fame and success. Both have a cast of, sometimes well-known, actors who ideally have a physical resemblance to the real-life people they’re portraying. The difference is, in the brand biopic, the star of the show is… a product. We are told the story of the creation of a well-known company or product, often following the main character(s) from their humble beginnings, through their eventual big break and often a moment or two where they think they’ll lose it all. The subgenre is a fairly new phenomenon (more on it’s origins later), but this year it has really taken off, with four big releases (so far). A video game, a shoe, a smartphone, a bag of chips, these are our protagonists of the year. They’re products most of us are already familiar with, which ideally would make us curious to know more. Personally, I couldn’t care less. To me, a lot of these movies just feel like a capitalistic cash grab, or a two hour long adverticement. But hey, maybe I’m just not the target audience here.

Embellishing the truth or straight up lying?

These movies usually marked themselves as “based on a true story”. But that phrase doesn’t necessarily mean that everything shown on screen is accurate compared to what actually happened. A few creative liberties for the sake of making a more interesting movie is fine, right? But these kinds of movies reach a wide audience, including people who may not know much of the backstory before watching the film. What I then find problematic is going as far as basing a movie on a proven lie, like the Flamin’ Hot movie from this year did. An LA Times investigation from 2021 exposed Richard Montanez for lying about creating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, and yet his story was spread worldwide when the movie was released back in June. A biopic like this could use lies to paint the creator (or the person who at least claims to be) in a better light, but it could also give quite a negative impression, haunting the real person the movie is based on, for years to come.

The Social Network (2010) stands as one of the first, and most well-known, examples of movies about the creation of a brand. Photo: Filmweb.no

The legacy of The Social Network

To understand where it all started we only have to go back to 2010. Starring Jesse Eisenberg as a young Mark Zuckerberg, as he’s creating what will eventually be known as Facebook, The Social Network is a genuinely good movie. It was a huge commercial success, loved by both critics and audiences, thus proving that there is in fact a marked for these biographical brand films.

Though there is one person who’s not the biggest fan of the movie: Mark Zuckerberg himself. As an incredibly private person who doesn’t really share a lot about himself with the public, The Social Network stands as one of the most accessible sources to who Zuckerberg is, and how he found success. The problem is that the screenwriters took a lot of creative liberties with the story, like painting Eduardo Saverin as the victim who got pushed out of the company for no reason, when in reality he apparently just wasn’t doing his job. The movie paints Zuckerberg as a vengeful and petty guy who only wants to get back at his ex, while the real Zuckerberg claims he only wanted to create a site for the people on campus to connect. Most people who have seen the movie, myself included until recently, take the story presented in the movie more or less as fact, and thus Mark Zuckerberg is still trying to overcome the negative, and inaccurate, portrayal of himself in David Fincher’s popular film.

Brand biopics are not my cup of tea, but maybe they’re yours? Here’s some more, and where you can watch them:

The Social Network (2010) - Viaplay NO
Saving Mr. Banks (2013) - Disney+
Joy (2015)
Steve Jobs (2015)
The Founder (2016)
House of Gucci (2021) - Prime Video
Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game (2022) - Hulu
Tetris (2023) - Apple TV+
Flamin’ Hot (2023) - Hulu, Disney+
Air (2023) - Prime Video
BlackBerry (2023) - in theater

Brand biopics: Are products our new protagonists?