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Why the new Steve Jobs biopic will be better than the last

A new trailer has arrived for the upcoming biopic Steve Jobs.

Maybe you’re thinking: “Wasn’t there already a biopic about Steve Jobs?” The answer is yes. In 2013, a movie about Jobs’s life starring Ashton Kutcher of Two and a Half Men as Jobs and Frozen actor Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak was released, but it received seriously terrible reviews.

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The new film is based on the bestselling biography of the Apple co-founder by Walter Isaacson and stars Michael Fassbender, who recently starred in the movie Slow West and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for 12 Years a Slave.

The movie co-stars actor Seth Rogen as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman, who worked at Macintosh in its early days.


The trailer has Wozniak asking, “What do you do? You’re not an engineer, you’re not a designer, you can’t put a hammer to a nail. I built the circuit board, the graphical interface was stolen. So how come ten times a day, I read, ‘Steve Jobs is a genius’? What do you do?”

“Musicians play their instruments,” Jobs replies. “I play the orchestra.”

Seth Rogen plays Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Seth Rogen plays Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

The project comes with a hefty pedigree. It’s directed by Danny Boyle, who won a Best Director Oscar for his 2008 movie Slumdog Millionaire, and the screenplay for the film was written by Aaron Sorkin, who recently got audiences enthralled by a story about technology (and won a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for his work) with the 2010 movie The Social Network.

Fassbender also arguably has more acting chops than Kutcher, having scored an Oscar nomination for his efforts in 2013’s 12 Years a Slave.

Kate Winslet plays Joanna Hoffman.

Kate Winslet plays Joanna Hoffman.

The question is, has the Hollywood trend “do-overs” now reached staid biopics? Audiences have been seeing it more and more with big-budget franchises over the past few years with the Spider-Man movies, the Hulk movies, the Superman films, and the Fantastic Four series all being remade often only several years after the last try.

In fact, if it stays on schedule, three years will separate The Amazing Spider-Man 2 with Andrew Garfield and a new Spidey movie set for 2017 with Tom Holland, making the 10-year stretch between takes on Fantastic Four seem positively lengthy.

This new take on Jobs’s legacy was perhaps warranted given the failure of the first attempt, but it wasn’t exactly needed.

However, if it’s good enough, perhaps audiences won’t mind.

This article originally appeared on the Christian Science Monitor.

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