While I’m sure that most of you spent your weekends texting friends on your iPhones, playing games on your iPads, and jamming with your iPods – there wasn’t a whole lot of you who went to see the movie about the man responsible for those inVentions.
Jobs, the Ashton Kutcher-led Steve Jobs biopic, had a very disappointing opening weekend at the box office. Opening in 2,381 theaters nationwide, Jobs was only able to rake in $6.7 million – making it one of Ashton Kutcher’s least-successful openings ever.
Box Office Mojo compares Jobs‘ opening weekend to that of another semi-recent film about a major tech pioneer – The Social Network. David Fincher’s Oscar-nominated film about Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg did more than three times the opening weekend box office.
It’s not really a shock that Jobs had a weak opening – especially if you follow reviews. Jobs has been pretty much universally panned by critics, and it currently sits with a 25% Rotten Tomatoes score.
“It’s a film whose plea to the audience resembles Jobs’ appeal to the crowd in that iPod-unveiling scene: ‘Believe this is important and exciting,’ it asks, ‘because I say so.'” says Slate’s Dana Stevens.
“A passionate attempt, Jobs ultimately lacks the polish and ‘greatness’ that Steve Jobs routinely aimed to deliver in his own products,” says ScreenRant’s Ben Kendrick.
And let’s not forget the words of Steve Wozniak himself, who happened to write a short review of the film for Gizmodo:
“I saw Jobs tonight. I thought the acting throughout was good. I was attentive and entertained but not greatly enough to recommend the movie. One friend who is in the movie said he didn’t want to watch fiction so he wasn’t interested in seeing it,” he said.
There’s also a chance that the film suffered from a weak marketing effort. You may remember that the film was originally supposed to premiere on April 19th, but was pushed back 4 months because some felt that it needed to benefit from additional marketing.