Even if you’re not an iDevotee, you have probably heard about the competing Steve Jobs movies due to hit our screens shortly. There’s the indie one starring Ashton Kutcher that premièred at Sundance this year, and there’s the ‘official’ one in pre-production, based on Walter Isaacson’s biography and featuring assistance from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and written by The Social Network‘s Aaron Sorkin. But now it seems there’s a third movie about the life of the late Apple co-founder, brought to you by the team behind comedy site Funny or Die.
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At just over an hour long, iSteve will be the longest video ever produced by the site — and with a 15 April release date, it’s claiming to be the first Jobs movie out this year. According to the New York Times, Funny or Die embraced the true essence of the internet (i.e. everything you need to know is on Wikipedia) and came up with the storyline based on Jobs’ lengthy page on the crowd-sourced encyclopaedia. “It’s very silly,” iSteve writer and director Ryan Perez told the newspaper. “But it looks at his whole life.”
Sow, how long did it take to put this all together? Perez said he wrote the 81-page script in three days and it was taped in five. Funny or Die also managed to get New Girl‘s Justin Long on board to play the lead role, along with James Urbaniak and Michaela Watkins to star as Bill and Melinda Gates.
With all the hype around the biopics, there was bound to be a spoof movie sooner or later. But it’s a touchy subject matter — after all, it’s not too difficult to annoy a hardcore iFan — so how do you get around being offensive in a biography, even if it is a humorous one? Allison Hord, who produced iSteve, said that they worked on the tone of the film to make sure that “even the harshest fanboy critics will be able to laugh with us.” We’ll have to see about that.
