The path to launching the “real” biopic of Apple founder Steve Jobs (versus this one, that one, or the other one) has been plagued with enough bugs, crashes, and forks in the road to resemble actual software development. We’ve covered the numerous changes in actors at length, so we won’t rehash all of that here, except to say that just about everybody in Hollywood was attached (at least temporarily) to Steve Jobs (except Ashton Kutcher). But the project just couldn’t seem to pull itself out of crisis mode, and Sony halted development around the time its own software was hacked.
Once Sony did the equivalent of selling off the source code to Universal, things picked up again. With Danny Boyle throwing Aaron Sorkin’s script up onto his Scrum board and running it through an Agile sprint to fast-track development, we finally got a Steve Jobs teaser trailer back in May. But that beta release previewed only very limited footage, edited to audio playing up Steve Jobs’ persona as a maverick visionary.
Now we get an official trailer, allowing us to test-drive the Steve Jobs experience first hand. While still reminding us that Jobs was ambitious and practically clairvoyant, this in-depth look also plays up the fact that he was a colossal prick. For a little over two minutes, we gain direct access to Steve Jobs’ personal-relationship operating system, as he alienates Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, berates his employees, pisses off the members of Apple’s board, incenses his marketing chief, appalls the mother of his child, neglects his child, and angers an off-screen fire marshal. The trailer jumps between pivotal points tied to milestone Apple product launches, each revealing how Jobs’ actions and maniacal pursuit for perfection took its toll in different ways, depending on whether he was the wavy-haired, pushy Jobs of the ’80s, the executive-trimmed, vengeful Jobs of the ’90s, or the 2000’s platinum-coiffed, slightly magnanimous Jobs.